


Recreating the patterns of fire

by dresdenlies



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Abusive Parents, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Animal Abuse, Animal Death, Arson, Backstory, Car Accidents, Child Abuse, Dark fic, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Disturbing Themes, Drug Use, Explicit Sexual Content, Graphic Description, Infidelity, Intrusive Thoughts, Multi, Murder, POV Child, Unfortunate Implications, Unhealthy Relationships, Violent Thoughts, vent fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2020-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 02:55:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20481677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dresdenlies/pseuds/dresdenlies
Summary: "Many things may strike us and fill us with an unexplained sense of familiarity, creating some instinctive link with our inner knowledge, but most things require further observation. Thankfully, Aiden Price was a quiet child who thought observing was his favourite activity."Backstory ficfor the Counselor. A tale of dehumanization, fire, innocence, birds, revenge, clashing masculinities, law of the jungle, and strife for beauty.





	1. Baby's first words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ShyChangling](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShyChangling/gifts), [donprisciotte (sorcio)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sorcio/gifts).

> IMPORTANT:  
Disturbing themes will be the main focus of this story. As such, you will encounter them practically all the time, presented in a more or less severe way. If you are interested in the contents or even the idea of it but want to pinpoint exactly what the more graphic bits might be, you can do so (in this case from chapter 2 on because nothing on the prologue is skippable without missing context establishing information ) by paying attention to the following symbol_ ~○~
> 
> It will be structured this way:
> 
> ~○~  
paragraph with graphic content  
~○~
> 
> You can demand a specific scene be modified to include that symbol before and after if you find it necessary. I'll comply swiftly to make the experience as safe as possible for those who have triggers.

Many things may strike us and fill us with an unexplained sense of familiarity, creating some instinctive link with our inner knowledge, but most things require further observation. Thankfully, Aiden Price was a quiet child who thought observing was his favourite activity.

He would spend hours sitting among the growing grass and weeds in his backyard looking up to the sky, at all the beautiful colours that it had throughout the day, even with bad weather, and most importantly he looked at the birds. It was fascinating to him how a bird could explore the whole world or simply fly away despite its small size.  
He figured that clouds were very special nests for the little birds that didn’t have parents or whose parents didn’t want them, and that they looked so soft and inviting so that those birds would feel welcomed and happy. Had he had the chance, Aiden himself would’ve kept observing the world from the safe space of a cloud, but the truth was that he wanted to fly away. Especially now that sunset had long passed and the sky had become dark, the birds were going back to their nests and as for Aiden nobody would have found him if he only could fly away…But he couldn’t.

“There you are!” his mother grabbed him roughly and started pulling him towards the door, making him whimper “Look at you, you’re filthy! I am not cleaning you up this time!” The house itself was pretty small as the biggest room, which also doubled as the entrance, was mostly a cramped kitchen in a corner with an old sofa, a table with three mismatching chairs and a TV occupying the rest of the space. The colours of the furniture were dull and the pale wallpaper with a discoloured pattern was falling off.  
As for the other rooms, the bathroom and his parents’ bedroom, they were much smaller, but Aiden slept in a closet: there were no windows nor enough space for his bed to fit, the door couldn’t close completely. He didn’t even have a proper light, he had a battery charged plastic lightbulb hanging. Sometimes not even that, as for example this time his mother took it away and pushed him in the closet, moving a chair under the door handle so that he couldn’t sneak outside without being heard.  
“No dinner nor light for you. About time you went to sleep, anyway.”

The boy stayed still, spying on her from the other side of the door. Her name was Maeve O’Connell and with Aiden being an Irish name like hers it was clear that she was excited to pick a name for her baby, if only to honour her origins, but he could never remember a moment where she wasn’t mad at him. Maybe he really did something that got on her nerves without realizing, but it mostly felt like she hated him for existing.  
She always looked like she was sick, the curls of her hair were ruined and her skin was getting paler, a taupe colour mixing with a purple undertone. Her face was puffy in an uneven way whereas the rest of her body looked emaciated. She was a very short lady, too, but she would never let that stop her from doing anything, on the contrary Aiden thought she was very loud. Her voice always sounded shrill to him and even the worn out romper she would wear at home looked loud. It was red, a colour loud and aggressive just like her. She groaned in frustration and kicked the couch on which her husband was sleeping in order to wake him up. He sat up with a yawn.

“For fuck’s sake, Maeve…” he rubbed his eyes, but he was clearly so tired that he couldn’t even display anger properly and every movement seemed to drain him more “I worked all day, can’t I have some peace and quiet for just _one_ minute, is it really too much to ask?”  
“And I want to not starve, for that matter, is that too much to ask?!” she raised her voice, then let herself unceremoniously on the sofa, now sitting next to her husband and crossing her arms “We need to talk seriously.”  
“About what this time?”  
“We need to send Aiden to kindergarten. I don’t want him around all day.”  
“Why would we?” his voice remained flat despite her demanding tone “It’s not mandatory, and it would only make everything worse.”  
“How?”  
“If people know that he exists then they’ll be onto us when they see that he is…Not right in the head.”  
He turned his face to the closet as he replied, meeting Aiden’s eyes with his own. The man’s irises were so dark that they couldn’t be distinguished from the pupils, yet they didn’t look like a deep abyss, they just looked…Empty, hauntingly hollow, like they were made of glass. The bags under his eyes and all the wrinkles forming around his mouth and on his forehead made him look so much older than he was, too. His hair was getting white already, and while his body was strong from working hard, he didn’t look healthy at all. Yet it was the child who had a problem.

“Logan.” Maeve demanded his attention “He’s not right in the head because we never let him out of the goddamn house!”  
“Then _you_ take him out. I have been working all day, you know!” he repeated as he pointed at the logo on the uniform he was wearing “Maybe you don’t realize how fucking tired I am, but I am exhausted and I don’t—”  
“Jesus fucking Christ!” she groaned “I know, okay?! You already told me! I know you’re tired, I know that you’ve ‘worked all day’, it’s all you’re capable of saying at this point.”  
She got up, walking around and flailing dramatically as she kept talking “You’re like one of those dolls that can only say two sentences and say them over and over and over like a broken record! You think I’ve been having fun?! I haven’t! And when I try to bring up a serious problem you keep whining about how ‘the job at the factory is tiring’ when it’s the machines that do the work!”  
“Oh really?” Logan kept a low tone but the anger in his voice was still audible “Who do you think has to tend to all the machines?”  
“I don’t know and I don’t care!” she replied in a defiant, almost childish tone, hands on her waist and a frown on her face “My day sucked as well and you might be tired but I sure don’t have the energy to deal with your bullshit right now.”  
“The energy?!” Logan finally raised his voice and got up as well, reaching for the first object that he could find – which happened to be the TV remote – only to throw it onto the floor “The energy?! Bitch, all you have to do is keep this dirt hole clean and you’re not even doing that!” he angrily made a wide gesture to point at the whole room, then grabbed a dirty plate from the sink “Look at this plate! Does it look clean to you? It’s not!”

He threw the plate on the floor as well, shattering it. Aiden knew the noise was going to be loud but the fact that they were doing this because of him was what made him startled. In fact, he was expecting his father to direct his anger at him, now, because it was so much easier to win against him than against Maeve, and so he did: seeing that Aiden was still listening to their argument, he removed the chair from under the door handle and pulled him by an arm, looking at his dirty clothes in disgust.  
“Why is he filthy?”  
“He’s always filthy, that’s his problem! I’m tired of finding him always in the mud like a pig! I washed his clothes so many times already but no, he’s not acting civilized still. Is this what my life has come to?!” Maeve’s voice started breaking “Washing your stupid clothes and then waiting for them to get dirty so I can wash them again?! This is not what we’ve planned, Logan.”  
“And whose fault is that?! This is what happens if you don’t want an abortion, but no, you had to keep the little shit, because all your friends were having babies, because you thought a fucking baby would’ve fixed this trainwreck!” he yelled, despite the child being right in front of him “Well, guess what? You couldn’t even make a normal kid, he is five and he still doesn’t talk! And you want to send him to school?! It’s a waste of my money, it’s a waste of everything!”  
“I know, but he’s alive now and we have to deal with it!”

Maeve froze for a moment and stared down at Aiden, who stared back up at her. Her copper eyes looked like there was a fire burning behind them and so did Aiden’s in defiance. Yes, he was a very silent boy and they had never heard him say anything that wasn’t just babble, but there was more to him, so much more. While Logan probably wasn’t aware of it – although he should’ve had at least some suspicions – Maeve would often leave him alone in the house and go out somewhere, sometimes leaving the TV on as a distraction, and Aiden quickly found out how to browse through channels and saw many things that made him start questioning how he lived.  
Namely, he was surprised to see how the houses the TV people lived in were like, they had datapads build in the walls and everything could be operated through simple commands while everything was still done manually where he was. He had never visited a neighbour's house, so sometimes he'd wonder which one was the 'correct way', but even without anything to compare his house to he felt there was something different in his own place not only from the furniture but from the way people behaved. The words they said to one another certainly weren't as charged with hate as the ones he'd hear everyday, and since that caught his attention he decided to carefully listen to pick up on the words' sounds. Sometimes in certain programmes there would be writings as well.  
All the writings he saw on TV didn’t make sense to him initially, but he would continue looking through the images with interest. Of course, when that happened he would spend most of time watching documentaries about animals and cultivating his love for birds, but he figured that among the programmess available there would be at least one that could teach him the bases of communication. So he secretly learned how to read, how to count to ten and how to better understand what others said. He actually felt happy when he could recognize the same word used in different contexts, when he could spot the patterns and figure out the meaning of words.

As for writing, he didn’t have the opportunity to practise much, just a couple of times he had attempted to write on the dirt outside with a stick, but it felt risky and he was afraid of being caught by his mother, so he did anything in order to prevent her from finding out and use that to his advantage. Yet he wondered if she had any idea, if even without evidence she could sense that he was smarter than he wanted her to think. He hoped she didn’t know, he _prayed_ that she didn’t know, because all the arguments that he had witnessed had ended with her winning and completely unafraid of her husband’s violent reactions because she always dominated him easily with her shouting and he would do whatever she wanted out of pure exhaustion.  
The way she was staring at him was threatening, he felt like she was trying to see through him and so he squinted, trying to look back inside of her and focusing to relive all the instants spent learning, but little did he know that she didn’t need to be aware that he was faking: Maeve was aware that her son was afraid of her and that was all she needed to know. Even downplaying his abilities, as convenient as he thought it was, was a direct consequence of his fear and no matter what, he would never be able to stop her…And so an evil grin appeared on her face.  
“Actually, you know what? We don’t have to.”

“W-what do you mean?” Logan paled.  
“You know _exactly_ what I mean.” She replied without looking at him, the fire in her eyes burning more and more, her pupils dilating in an otherworldly stare “Give him a bath.”  
Logan remained silent for a moment with a blank expression, but eventually he nodded.  
“Alright.”  
He grabbed Aiden and started dragging him into the bathroom, with his wife following him, and started ripping off his clothes almost furiously, ignoring his cries, violently throwing him into the bathtub. The boy whined in pain and then flinched at the cold water when his father opened the faucet, holding his knees to his chest. His parents seemed very impatient seeing the water rose so slowly, and kept giving him hateful looks. He didn’t know what they wanted to do, but they really thought he was ‘not right in the head’ to the point that they didn’t even bother not saying it out loud and the fact that they were speaking nonchalantly made him clench his fists in anger.  
“I have another idea.” Commenced Logan, only to be interrupted.  
“I don’t wanna hear that, we’re going through with this.”  
“Yeah, we are, but I know how we can make money out of it.” this time he was assertive, he knew she was going to listen “You’re the one who has to find a contact and make the deal while I’m at work, though.”  
“Ohhh!” Maeve was strangely delighted “I get it. You wanna keep them in the fridge?”  
“For now.”  
“Hm.”

A moment of silence followed. Aiden felt completely lost, panicking as he reran that conversation in his head multiple times trying to piece the meaning together but still couldn’t understand. He held his knees to his chest tighter, and although it wasn’t visible because of the water rising he had started shaking.  
“Do you think the cleaver will be enough?”  
“If you’re careful, I don’t see why not.” She shrugged “He’s tiny.”  
“Alright, then. I’m gonna go fetch it.”  
“You do that,” she smirked as she placed on the back of Aiden’s head, his shaved curls were growing back and she had to readjust her grip “I’ll start in the meantime.”  
The last thing Aiden saw clearly was Maeve’s grin getting wider as she shoved his head under the water, his vision soon got blurred and the water got into his ears, nose and mouth. He couldn’t breathe and the more he tried to get back on the surface the more his mother pushed his head back down, beating it angrily and repeatedly on the bottom of the bathtub. At some point, something inside of him told him that he had to pretend he was dead and so he stopped struggling, keeping his eyes closed.

“Is…Is he dead?” Logan had come back into the room with a large meat cleaver in his hand and saw her starting to drain the water.  
“I think so.”  
Logan remained in silence until the water was drained completely, as if he needed confirmation that Aiden was actually dead. Maeve was already rolling her eyes at that silence, probably predicting to hear some regretful speech from him, but when he saw his child unmoving he actually smiled, his voice sounding happy like Aiden never heard it.  
“Good!” even without looking at him Aiden could tell that his expression was happy for the first time since they had him “Then it’s my turn, now.”  
When Logan approached the bathtub and turned him around, Aiden couldn’t help but cough out the water. He wished he could hold back, but he gasped for air, and tried to open his eyes but the water had gotten in them and his vision was still blurry.  
“Fuck!” his father sounded caught off guard “He’s still alive!”  
“Who cares! Just chop him up!”  
Aiden shook in terror and deep inside knew there was no way he was going to survive unless he threw them off again, and with the painful grip of his father around his neck to keep him still he had to scream:  
“NO! PLEASE, STOP!”

Logan let go off Aiden immediately and this time even Maeve was shocked. They remained in complete silence staring at him, he just sat up and rubbed his eyes to get the water out. They looked like they had several questions buzzing through their minds, like they were wondering how it was possible and how long had it been, but it was Aiden who spoke once again, giving them the most heartbroken glance as his eyes filled with tears:

“_Why_?”

Maeve shook her head and just wrapped him in a towel, this time not to smother him but to dry him, and then put his underwear back on him.

“Just go to sleep.”

He nodded and walked back to his closet, dragging the door behind him to keep it as closed as possible. He climbed on his bed and threw kicks at the wall, this time he didn’t care about anything. He wanted his parents to know that he was crying out loud. Hearing their footsteps get closer made him cry even louder, without knowing if for the shock or because he wanted their attention, but all they did was put the chair back under the door handle in order to keep him inside. Aiden stopped crying only for a second when he heard his father’s voice:

“What do we do now?”

“Don’t worry,” Maeve reassured him “I’ll find another way.”

After that, nothing. They prepared and had dinner like nothing happened, making small talk prompted by frivolous TV programs and then they turned everything off and went to sleep without addressing anything. The inside of the closet was pitch black at night and it was hard to breathe, but unlike most children his age Aiden was past the fear of the dark. Which was because Aiden, unlike most children, knew that in the darkness there weren’t monsters hiding to stare at him without being seen, but the other way around. As he closed his eyes, he made a wish: to wake up early the following morning to sound of chirping birds, to find them outside and fly away with them.


	2. Mommy was just playing a game

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiden witnesses his mother playing with a friend...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I changed the rating from M to E for this. 
> 
> (warnings: explicit sexual content, child witnessing sexual acts, drug usage, child molestation without physical contact)

Aiden woke up to the sound of the birds early in the morning. The inside of the closet still very dark, and the air heavier after having spent the night there. What he could see of the main room seemed quiet, almost peaceful, and he wanted sneak out to enjoy the quietness and go see the birds. So he slightly pushed the chair, but as he heard footsteps he immediately hid under the covers remaining as still as he could.

Luckily it was only his father heading to the bathroom to get ready for work. He didn’t dislike him as much as he disliked his mother, and while it was obvious to him that Logan never wanted a child and merely accepted to _let him exist_ because Maeve ordered him to, he didn’t treat him too horribly, not spontaneously. If anything, he was kind or at least smart enough to fill a sock with oranges before hitting him so that there wouldn’t be external bruises afterwards. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking, but the idea of his father not wanting to leave visible bruises simply because he didn’t want to rather than to get away with it was comforting.

Hearing the noise of the shower, Aiden decided to sneak out of the closet, making sure not to move the chair too much. He was almost paranoid about his mom, internally praying that she didn’t wake up – a part of him prayed that she _never_ woke up! God, how did he want to fly away…And his wish to wake up early the sound of birds came true, maybe they could take him with them. The air on the outside was fresh: he noticed from the mud that it had rained that night, and he spotted a sparrow bathing in a puddle in his backyard.

“Birdie!” he called the bird under his breath, slowly walking closer “Take me to the clouds, please.”

The animal stopped and turned its little head to him. It almost looked like it wanted to ask him something.

“I’ll be quiet, I promise. I’m not bad like mommy says.”

The bird restarted bathing without paying attention to him.

“Please…”

As soon as Aiden took another step closer, the sparrow flew away. No other bird came to take him out of the house, no matter how much he waited. So he started looking around: the place where he lived seemed to be very isolated, the houses in his street were small and distant from one another, surrounded by trees. He was far away from the industrialized city, and wasn’t even sure that the city as an environment _existed_ as he had only seen it on TV. Most of the things he had seen were from the tv, actually, because he never got to leave the house.

Some little voice inside of him blamed him with a vicious tone: “_You only want to go up in the sky because it’s the only place you’ve ever seen. That’s why the birds don’t want you._” Birds explored the whole world, all the time, and that is how they recognized that he wasn’t like them. He didn’t know anything and despite his mother calling him tiny the day before his size made him too much of a burden for birds to deal with. His parents thought he was a burden too, anyway. The birds were simply agreeing. If he wasn’t a burden maybe he wouldn’t even feel the need to fly away…

His thoughts were interrupted as the phone rang. It was loud and he didn’t want Maeve to wake up, so he quickly ran back inside and tiptoed to reach the phone to pick it up:

“Hello?”

“Maeve?” a deep male voice called from the other side “Did he leave yet?”

He looked around in silence. What to do now? Should he hang up the phone and escape? Then it would’ve rung again…

“Maeve!” the man insisted “Are you there?”

“Yes. Give me a second.”

He put down the phone without hanging up, but it slipped and in an attempt to put it back in its place he tried climb the table and accidentally fell down with it. He froze in fear as his mother heard the table fall and caught him.

“What the hell are you doing out of your room?!”

He didn’t respond. Maeve clenched her fists.

“Answer me, I know you can talk!”

“The phone rang…I—”

“Go back to sleep!” not even the time to finish that she pushed him, he fell on his butt onto the floor. He glanced at the phone for a moment, and Maeve frantically went to pick it up.

“Hello? …Yeah…Wow, already?”

He tried to make out what words were being spoken on the other side, but she turned and started yelling furiously:

“I SAID GO BACK TO SLEEP, AIDEN, GODDAMMIT!” she focused again on the call as he went back in “Sorry, you were saying…? Ah, don’t mind him, I’ll lock him up when you come….Uh-uh…”

After a bit, she scoffed. Aiden tilted his head in confusion. “Why would you want to meet him? He’s a disgrace! …Hm….Alright, whatever. See you later.”

She hung up the phone and opened the closet door wide, looking down at Aiden sitting on his bed.

“There’s a friend of mine who is coming here, so try to be quiet.”

“I’ll stay here.” he nodded.

“No, he wants to talk to you, for some reason, so you better look good and be a good boy, okay?”

“Okay…What’s his name?”

“Stavros Ariti.” she shrugged “Not that names mean anything.”

“Why is his name so strange?”

“He’s foreign. He comes from Greece.”

Greece. He tried to recall if he heard about it while watching documentaries, but nothing came to his mind.

“Where is Greece?”

“Far away. Maybe he has some pictures, he’s one of those losers that take pictures for a living, so he might show you some of Greece if he has any.”

“Oh…Mommy, are there birds in Greece?”

“I…Wh-what the fuck do birds have to do with anything?”

“Nothing.”

“…Mh.”

As his mother turned around, Aiden called her.

“Mommy?”

“Ugh, what do you want?!”

“Is he friends with daddy too?”

“No. In fact, you shouldn’t tell him, or he will get mad at you.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I will kill you for real this time, okay?” she answered way too casually talking in a baby voice, while tucking him in bed “Now sleep some more.”

“Okay.”

A moment of silence followed. Maeve kept adjusting the sheets around her son and suddenly she started staring at him. She was thinking about something, something bad. He saw the fire in her eyes again, and it clicked immediately. It was like he could hear her thoughts for a second, a voice urging her to smother him with a pillow. If he stayed silent, she could’ve done it more easily, so maybe if he said the right words at the right time he could throw her off guard and gain at least a few minutes. That was what saved him last time, at least…

“What do I wear?”

“Hm…Good question, let me find you something nice.”

She started looking among the clothes, carefully at first and then mindlessly, throwing onto his bed a random outfit consisting of a red shirt and a brown pair of pants. Aiden curled his mouth seeing that. 

“I don’t like red, it’s loud.”

“What does that even mean? Colours can’t be loud, you dumbass. It doesn’t matter what colours you like, anyway.”

He stayed silent for a moment and then he shrugged.

“…I like purple.”

“That’s a girls’ colour.” she raised her lip in disgust “The last thing I need is raising a sissy.”

“What’s a sissy?”

“Ugh, nevermind. Point is: you don’t have purple clothes and you shouldn’t wear them anyway.”

The boy tilted his head and pointed at the red romper his mom was wearing.

“Then why are you wearing a boys’ colour?”

Maeve groaned and went back to looking among the clothes, finding a blue shirt.

“Blue, do you fucking like blue?!”

“Yeah.”

“There you go, then.” She replaced the red shirt with the blue one “Are you gonna shut up now?”

Aiden nodded and lowered his head. She sighed in relief.

“Fucking finally! Stay here until my friend arrives.”

“Okay.”

Maeve gave him a strange look for a moment and then headed back to her room, making sure to put the chair out of the closet door. The boy had no choice but to stay in bed and slowly fall asleep again.

When he woke up, he heard chatter from outside the closet and Maeve emitting a shrill laugh. Spying on her, he could notice she was sitting at the table next to a man. He had short brown hair, and his skin was white but tan. Aiden wasn’t sure how old he could be, maybe in his mid-thirties, but he couldn’t really see his face from there. He didn’t know when to come out, but in doubt he put on the clothes his mom prepared for him, while trying to pay attention to what was being said.

“I want more!” Maeve commanded loudly. Something was off with her.

“I see it’s already working for you.” he chuckled “Shouldn’t you go easy today? Been a while since last time.”

“Hell no! It’s exactly why I need more!” she whined “Fucking Logan won’t let me do anything and can’t even keep it up, now if I have to get my own fun so be it.”

He didn’t respond and leaned with his face on the table, sniffling. He didn’t seem to be crying though, maybe he had a cold? When he raised his head again, he emitted a loud groan. Maeve planted a playful kiss on his ear:

“…So?”

“It’s me getting you your fun, you know. I gave you my ‘sugar’, now you give me some of _your_ sugar.”

Maeve then kissed him on his lips, grinning.

“It’s my way of repaying you.”

She grabbed him by his collar and pushed him on the couch, now Aiden could see them more clearly. She caressed his chest as she unbuttoned his shirt, then roughly took it off and threw it on the floor. Stavros placed his hands on her waist, pulling her onto his lap. The kisses continued and got more and more sloppy, more…Strange. Aiden thought it was disgusting, but although he wanted to look away he couldn’t, because he had to know why his mom didn’t want him to tell anyone, know how many secrets she had.

~○~

He remained quite disturbed when Stavros removed her romper and he could see her breasts, he felt like he wasn’t supposed to witness that, but what would looking away have solved?

There was something hypnotizing about that scene, yet it was so in a way that he didn’t like. He could see Maeve’s expression, but it was different, she didn’t look like herself: _her eyes_…Her eyes were not hers anymore. They didn’t have that light copper colour that she had passed onto her son, they were turning completely black, with her pupils huge staring down at her ‘friend’ as she was riding him and _God_ was she loud, with those shrill screams and her bouncing breasts small yet flabby to the point of disgusting, she didn’t even look human anymore. She looked like she was being possessed by the devil, twitching and twitching like a shapeless mountain of bones and flesh. Aiden felt like he wanted to throw up.

Suddenly, the documentaries came back to his mind, those flashing images on TV didn’t bother him until that very moment: they happened to be in front of him a few times, but although he could barely understand what those mating rituals were he figured that it was something that animals did. It felt wrong to know that people were able to do that too.

…Yet the more he watched, the more he understood why that was right for her. Her crazed expression felt like her everyday face shattered in a thousand pieces and the real Maeve was showing, loud and demanding and completely insane as always, however this time without any filter; yet Stavros was so much bigger than her, and Aiden for some reason prayed that he’d tackle her and show her he was the stronger one, biting her neck like he was going to devour her. It was what she deserved.

Something inside of him boiled and he felt the taste of his own stomach juices coming up, this time not because he wanted to puke but out of anger spawning a strange, morbid satisfaction as Stavros obeyed his silent command. He liked to think that he was guiding those violent thrusts to make her scream like a demon with no human shame, like a beast whose only purpose was being loud to get more and more hits. He liked to think he was guiding that action like Maeve guided Logan whenever he hurt him, finally getting revenge on all the pain he had to endure because of her…Yet how much of a punishment could it be when she had no shame and was enjoying it?

So he kept praying, he was not sure for what, maybe for her to feel the humiliation and shame, but he was _desperate_ to see that man go beyond making her feel good and just hurt her, more and more, and so he did. Maeve got even louder as the pace became faster, taking it from behind as Stavros squeezed her breasts and did bite her neck as Aiden prayed, like a lion attacking his prey in the savannah. Now he just had to bite harder and harder, tear down the skin of her neck, bare her flesh and eat her as he took over her, blood spilling everywhere and her insides squishing in sync with the slapping sound of his sack against her, to reduce her to a puddle of blood and devour her, devour her, devour her, devour her, devour her, devour her, devour her.

“You’re so wet, bitch.” Stavros panted, he seemed tired “Are you coming yet?”

“Y-yeah…AH!” she gasped “I’m…I’m comin—”

~○~

She interrupted herself with the loudest, most chilling scream so far. Aiden felt it in his bones and started shaking in fear. Coming where? For what? For him? He didn’t understand what that meant, Maeve’s face was scaring him like she was in fact a demon coming for him, and her scream seemed to never end, to the point that he pushed the door open letting the chair fall because he couldn’t take it anymore: 

“STOP IT!”

A moment of silence followed. Both were staring at him, with their eyes wide open and their pupils huge. Maeve seemed to snap out of it first, becoming more alarmed and slowly reaching for her romper to get dressed again. Stavros put his clothes back on a few moments later, with the child still looking at the scene completely silent. After a while, Stavros spoke:

“…That’s him?”

“Yeah.”

“Baby…” he whispered, biting his bottom lip and eyeing the boy with a look that was difficult to describe rationally, all Aiden could hear while looking in his eyes were the words ‘I want to eat you’, but it didn’t make sense…Unless Stavros actually thought about devouring Maeve while they were mating, maybe thinking the same thing would explain why he could instantly know. It might have been just the shock from having witnessed them together, maybe Stavros did not want to eat him, but if he did…That way he could communicate even without talking, so he kept standing still, mentally asking what did he want. Stavros smiled at him and glanced down at a large cardboard box which he seemed to have wrapped personally – he didn’t do a good job with it – and took it, kneeling to match Aiden’s height as he handed it to him.

“Come here, angel, I brought a present for you.”

Before he could reply, Maeve groaned.

“Why you would buy him stuff?!”

“Come on, everyone needs a present every now and then!”

“Well, I don’t want to hear Logan whine about it.”

“And you’re afraid of Logan since when, exactly?"

“I’m not, but if there’s anything we agree on is that we want the little shit out of the way.” she quickly replied sternly, glaring at her son “Spoiling him will only make this worse…”

“Well, I already got this anyway. Here.”

He insisted in handing the box to Aiden, but it was bigger than he was, and he had to place it on the floor. Stavros admired his little hands undoing the wrapping and his eyes getting sparkly when he uncovered his present, a giant teddy bear.

“Mommy! Can I keep it?”

“No, you c—”

“Don’t listen to her, it’s all yours.” He took the teddy bear out of the box and handed it to him, kissing his forehead “His name is Lucky, because he’s very happy to be your friend.”

“Really?” he held the teddy bear tight, at which Maeve rolled her eyes.

“Why don’t you shove both of them in the box and take them somewhere out of my sight? You’d solve a few of my problems, that’s for sure.”

Stavros gasped, he seemed genuinely offended on Aiden’s behalf.

“That’s so mean! Also, if I could I’d take him with me gladly, he is the cutest kid I’ve ever seen.”

“Then you’re lucky because we almost chopped him up yesterday.” She shrugged “Shame we didn’t.”

“Why would you do something like that?!”

“To earn some money out of it, I don’t know. I heard they pay a lot for…Uh, children’s stuff.”

“Speaking of ‘children’s stuff’, you know I’m a photographer...”

“Yeah, cool, what does that have to do with anyth--”

“_I think little Aiden here would make a great model_.”

Stavros smiled; he seemed convinced of what he was saying. He had brought his camera too, it was on the table next to an empty little plastic bag. As he took it, he had to dust it from some sugar that must’ve been spilled on the table – probably when they had coffee while he was sleeping, although there weren’t any dirty cups, maybe Maeve washed them? – and took a picture of Aiden holding his ‘lucky’ teddy bear. The boy nervously tightened his grip, not knowing what to think and looking up at his mother, who now had a thoughtful expression.

“…And you think we can actually earn money from that? Who wants to pay for the picture of a child when they could just get some on the internet for free?”

“Oh, Maeve, you’re so naïve sometimes! We’re not going to take pictures that people can find easily.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Your son is an adorable child. So adorable that I think that many people would want him, if you know what I mean…”

“…Want him…Like ‘want want’ him or…?”

“Are you in or not?”

“Okay.” She took Aiden’s hand “Let’s go.”

~○~

Aiden whined as his mom roughly pulled him by his arm towards her bedroom, then snatched Lucky off his hands to put it onto her bed and locked the door behind her as soon as Stavros followed them.

“Mommy…” he was getting more and more nervous “I don’t understand.”

“My friend Stavros will take some nice pictures of you.”

“Why?”

“Because he wants to see if you’re a good boy and do as he says. If you’re not good he’s gonna have to give Lucky to another kid.”

“Oh.”

“So just get on the bed and let him take pictures…But take your clothes off, first.”

“Do I have to go wash?”

“No, no. Just take your clothes off.”

He took off his shirt and pants. With a nod Stavros silently ordered him to take off his underwear as well. As he shyly tugged it down he could feel the man’s stare on him and climbed on his parents’ bed, instinctively covering himself with the teddy bear. Stavros took a picture.

“You’re so cute…Can you kiss him on the cheek?”

Aiden complied swiftly.

“That’s good, but I can barely see you. Do it from the side, please.” He observed him adjust his position to kiss Lucky’s cheek from the side, kneeling on the bed and exposing himself more “Yeah, just like that…Raise your butt a little bit.”

Stavros took a picture once he felt satisfied with the pose. Maeve watched in silence, she seemed to be pondering something. She felt…Calculating, despite her eyes still being somewhere else in an otherworldly way rather than in a pensive mood. She pondered for a bit and spoke only after a while:

“How much do you think someone would pay to meet him? That would get me even more money.”

“Hm…That might be riskier.” Responded Stavros thoughtfully but still without taking his eyes off the boy “We should stick to the pictures to satisfy many clients at a time.”

“How about an auction?”

“That could be a good idea, actually. They’d pay so much it could be even a one-time deal.”

“Maybe I should tell Logan about it, then.”

“Or maybe we can keep it to ourselves and leave to actually have fun.”

“What about Aiden?”

“He’ll come with us. I want you to earn money, but I also would like to spend some time with the boy…” his tone quickly became morbid “I really see the way you two are alike now…And I’d love to see them when he grows up as well…”

“Hell no! I’m not taking him on trips or anything, no matter what you say. I don’t want him around.”

“But I’m being good!” Aiden objected. He didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but his mother's constant disapproval made him sad and the fact that following orders still didn’t work even with a guest that was nice to him was not fair and he didn’t want them to forget that he was being good.

“Yes, you are. You’re a very good boy.” Stavros seemed very pleased “Now why don’t you let Lucky give you a bear hug? He loves to give hugs.”

He hugged the bear, losing balance for a moment and ending up on top of it.

“Mmm…He really is a lucky bear.”

He sat up and while adjusting he noticed he was sitting onto its lap, in a position similar to Maeve’s at the beginning. He didn’t know what to think of that, he simply pointed it out before he could take the time to decide if it was dangerous to do that, because he had the urge to make it known whenever he spotted patterns…But this time he shouldn’t have.

“Look: just like mommy.”

“I—Goddammit, Aiden…!” Maeve was outraged and almost walked towards him menacingly, but Stavros blocked her and laughed heartily.

“I love that! Aiden, would you like to ride him like mommy did?”

He felt a shiver down his spine. He didn’t like watching that and certainly didn’t want to do it himself. She looked terrifying while doing that! And the screams…They made him so uncomfortable. He pouted.

“But she screamed when she did that…”

“Oh!” Stavros shook his head “You don’t have to worry about that, it doesn’t hurt at all! Mommy was just having fun, right Maeve?”

“Ugh…Yeah.”

“See? It’s gonna feel really nice. Try it.”

“Okay…”

Aiden reluctantly started straddling the bear slowly. The fabric tickled him in a strange way, making him feel exposed, even more naked somehow. Another shiver down his spine seemed to warn him that Stavros’s glance on him was getting more and more intense, and the clicking on the shutter button more frantic, it didn’t stop even when he turned to look at him in the eyes, still wide open and attentive yet lost in his body, still silently saying ‘I want to eat you’, ‘I want to devour you’, but also preparing for it. Those eyes were licking him and he didn’t like that. He felt dirty.

“Can you…Can you sit on his nose, now, sweetie? Legs spread, facing me, please?”

“Why?” he asked defensively. He didn’t want to do this anymore.

“Just trust me, okay?”

Stavros attempted a friendly smile, while Maeve just commanded coldly.

“_Do it_.”

He obeyed and emitted a whimper as he felt the bear’s hard nose under him, the wax over the embroidery, pulling away immediately because of the sudden stinging sensation, alarming Stavros.

“What is it?”

“It feels funny…” Aiden glanced away. For some reason, he was feeling ashamed. Very, very ashamed…But he was just being a good boy, wasn’t he? If he started being bad, Maeve would have killed him. He had to be good.

“Did it hurt?”

“Yes…No. I don’t know, it stings.”

“Oh.” Stavros feigned innocence and started walking towards the bed “That depends on how you place yourself, let me help—”

“No.” Maeve quickly stood between him and Aiden, much to the latter’s surprise. Why did she care all of a sudden? Aiden couldn’t understand why, but he was thankful. “You’re not laying a finger on him, you pig.”

“Why?” he scoffed, then teasingly leaned to match her height “_Because he might like it as much as you do?_”

Maeve stood still as a rock, not flinching nor even blinking.

“I don’t give a shit about your dick and neither does he…Unless you’ve got like a million dollars for this auction.”

Stavros raised an eyebrow.

“You really think they’d pay that much for a black kid?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!”

She pushed him, but he grabbed her by her wrists, holding tight.

“I’m doing you a favour, you owe me some time with him.”

“So what? I don’t owe anything to anyone.”

~○~

“Listen up, you ungrateful slut!” he pushed her against the wall “If you don’t give me the kid after it’s all done there will be nothing to auction.”

“You wouldn’t…!”

Stavros pushed Maeve on the floor and grabbed the child, running to the other room and shoving him inside the box, closing it and lifting it to take it back into his car. What happened immediately after, Aiden never knew as he blacked out. 


	3. Vroom Vroom Crash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While recovering from the assault, Aiden hopes to bring his father by his side...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: violence on child/child abuse, car accident, animal cruelty, arson, violent and/or disturbing intrusive thoughts.

When he woke up, Aiden found himself in an unfamiliar place. He was laying in a hospital bed. The room was clean and it surprised him how different places could smell, then again he had only ever been in his house and while cleaning was done it certainly wasn’t a priority. Sometimes Maeve would pretend to be the one tending to the house, it was an excuse for not going to work, but with all her other pastimes it was clear that she wasn’t going to be a housewife. Many things could be said about that, but for now Aiden was really invested in how different that environment was, before even wondering how he got there. It was cold and aseptic like any hospital, but some attempts to liven the room were made with some colorful orange details on the walls and various drawings of flowers and anthropomorphic animals with big cartoony eyes and big smiles. 

A doctor approached him slowly, he was a kind looking young man that seemed to put extra care in trying not to look threatening, or at least Aiden could truly sense pity shining through him, without knowing yet if he was thankful for it or if it was something to be ashamed of – after all he was used to the consequences being unpleasant whenever he gave off clear signs that things were not alright. The doctor had caramel skin and soft curly hair, his eyes were dark but sparkly and his smile exuded the warmth that only a sensitive person could have. The name on his tag said Simon Doolittle. He looked like he genuinely had good intentions and that was something inexplicably annoying about him. Perhaps Aiden should have listened to that voice he heard that made him instantly know, yet this time the voice didn’t seem to say anything like ‘I want to eat you’. It didn’t say anything at all, actually. Maybe if he squinted a little bit… 

“Aiden?” the doctor called him “How are you feeling?” 

“I don’t know.” He strangely spat back without thinking about it. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to understand what just happened, he just thought that the situation he had at home was something that he wasn’t quite capable of explaining, not even to someone smart and meant to grasp signals immediately. Then it came back to him. “Where are mommy and daddy?” 

“They came to visit you early this morning. They are looking forward to see you healthy again to take you home.” 

“That’s not true. Especially mommy.” 

“Heh.” the doctor seemed very uncomfortable with that response. Aiden wondered if he was going to reassure him with some lie about how much his parents loved him. After all, the doctor looked like he didn’t want to point out how bad his situation was. Because ‘children weren’t supposed to go through abuse’, as everyone seemed to agree on TV, but then again Logan had reminded him multiple times that everything on TV was fake. Mostly when he tried to watch cartoons or anything too happy or colorful, but his beloved animal documentaries too were subjected to that judgement. Something inside of him whispered that even if it was completely true itself, it would still be fake in his world because it would be distant to the point of being a simple story, since he wasn’t part of that world at all. Then it whispered that it was Logan’s case as well. Dr Doolittle still felt the need to say something. “It was her who took you here.” 

“Why? They both said they want me dead.” 

“Wh-what?” Dr Doolittle tried to fake a laughter that was supposed to suggest silliness, but it sounded hysteric. Aiden’s expression saddened, but he still had to ask. 

“Can you do something to help me?” 

“I-- Sure, I will do all I can. Everything you ask.” 

“Okay...” he started thinking about it “I like to watch documentaries about birds.” 

“Oh, you want me to get you a TV? I can ask--” 

“Can you make me a bird?” 

“A...Bird?” 

“Yes. Birds can fly because their bones are empty. Can you empty my bones?” 

“You want to become a bird?” 

Aiden nodded. 

“Why?” 

“Because I want to fly away.” 

“_ Oh. _ ” those words seemed to hit the doctor like a truck. He knew what happened, at least a little bit because if Maeve and Logan brought the child to him then they _ had _ to explain, but it was like he didn’t want to discuss it. Probably because of that pity that he blatantly felt. 

“I just want to be okay...But every day it feels like I’m drowning, but it burns...” 

“Does it burn right now?” 

“Yeah. It hurts.” 

“Aiden...” 

“Can you call the police?” 

“No...No, I can’t.” 

“Please...” 

The doctor curled his nose and mouth, trying to crinkle his face as much as he could to distract himself from the urge to cry. Or at least, Aiden knew deep inside that he wanted to cry. 

“Alright. I will call for help, but your parents are taking you home tomorrow, so...Be careful.” 

“Okay.” 

“Heh...” the doctor gave him a sad smile “Do you want to know a fun fact about birds?” 

“Oh!” finally the child’s expression became happy, like every child should be “Yes!” 

“You know, there is a legendary bird that is called the phoenix. When it dies, it catches fire and then comes back to life. It’s one of the purest and most beautiful birds, but here’s the thing: since it’s a legendary creature, you don’t have to go look for a bird or fire. You’ve been feeling like you’re burning, but you’re alive, and that is a bit like the phoenix, isn’t it? You’re already a bird, for what matters.” he gently patted the child’s head “And I promise you that you will be able to fly away very soon.” 

“Really?” 

“Really.” the doctor smiled “Now please rest some more. I’ll come back later to check up on you.” 

“Okay.” 

The rest of the day went on quietly, with Aiden being obedient to the doctors’ commands and thinking about this new bird that Doolittle told him about. He waited to see his parents come to visit him, but they didn’t and he remained alone for the rest of the evening. Perhaps for the better, but he was still sad about it.   
During the night, he was woken up by the doctor speaking to a nurse out of his room. 

“Simon, what the hell are you saying?!” the nurse sounded alarmed “Are you out of your mind?” 

“No. I mean it.” 

“B-but...!” she stuttered “You can’t do that!” 

“I’m sorry. I thought I was strong enough, I thought that I could handle this, but I can’t. I really can’t. When I studied medicine I wanted to help people, you know that idealized view of it that you have at the start? That. But...I didn’t take into account that I was going to see this, to see people like this – no, monsters like this do what they did to that kid...” 

“I know, and I get it, but right because that child is helpless you have to do something. You can’t quit.” 

“His mother is completely insane. She said that she will know if I tell the police, because she’ll send someone after me, that I’m not going to be safe anywhere. She might even hurt the boy if I call for help.” 

Of course Maeve threatened everyone. Even when she wasn’t there, she had so much power, and it wasn’t fair. Aiden just wanted to take advantage of her absence to take her down from behind, to yank away her control and sneak away to safety. She didn’t deserve any mercy. He had to plot his revenge, somehow. 

“I will do it, then.” 

“No! Please don’t. If—If they find out that you know, they’ll come for us both.” 

“Simon--” 

“Listen, I’m sorry, but I really can’t do this anymore.” he started walking away “See ya around.” 

“Bye...” 

Aiden spent the following morning in complete silence, not wanting to talk to the doctor because there was no point in it anyway. He patiently waited for his parents to come pick him, if only to go back to the normality he hated and forget the nightmare of the latest days. When they arrived, they didn’t even say hi and just roughly carried him to the car. The car was very ugly, it was old and just dreary looking with all that rust covering a paint job that was supposed to be white.   
He didn’t even have the time to look around the way between the hospital entrance and the car because they were so fast, and once he was in the rain clouded all the windows and blurred the view. Sometimes it really did feel like he wasn’t allowed to see the outside world. 

Aiden sat in the backseat of the car as Maeve drove back home. He was surprised that she was the one who took him to the hospital, given how much more vocal she was about hating him, but Logan didn’t look interested at all and as always he didn’t react. The man was distractedly staring out of the window, eyes half closed, undoubtedly tired but that shouldn’t have had anything to do with what happened, yet Aiden knew he was going to use it as an excuse. Still, whenever he looked at his father trying to dig deep into his soul, he couldn’t see nor hear anything. Not even ‘I want to eat you’, when he more than anyone should have had those words echo in his mind, more than Maeve and more than Stavros. He should have wanted to eat them both. He should have wanted to eat Aiden, and Aiden himself wanted it to be that way. He just wanted him to come alive. 

“Daddy?” he called, but no answer. That was not fair, it was not fair that he didn’t answer when the act of talking itself was still something shocking coming from Aiden. Then it came to the boy’s mind that he had to use the right words: screaming ‘STOP!’ and asking what he should wear saved him when his parents tried to murder him, and when he pointed out that he was in the same position of his mother while posing to take pictures with the teddy bear he put himself in danger. Words were the key and he could use them to unlock the reaction he wanted from others and while perhaps that should have been obvious it felt like a discovery to him, like he spotted another pattern, but this time he had to keep it to himself so that he could use it to save his life again. Now it was the time to use it again. 

“Daddy, are you okay?” 

Logan’s breath hitched. He turned to his son. 

“What are you talking about?” his voice not as flat as he wanted it to be. Aiden failed to hide a smirk, happy with having triggered a reaction. 

“You look sad.” He pointed out. Maeve groaned quietly as she kept driving, not wanting to get involved. Logan squinted in irritation. ‘Why point out the obvious?’ was the question emerging from him, finally something was emerging! A tiny glint of anger was now showing in his empty eyes. 

“So what? You noticed now?!” 

Aiden felt his pupils widen, as if they were taking in the hints of life in Logan’s eyes, treasuring them. He was on the backseat and his father climbing back to reach him would have been dangerous due to the speed of the car. So he could provoke him and be safe, because if Maeve got distracted by an eventual violent reaction they could have all died on the spot and it was just not worth it. He could play on that. 

“If-- if you had something in your teeth...And-- and nobody at work told you...Would you be mad at me? ...If I told you now?” 

The look on Logan’s face was now shocked. Maybe because that was the longest and most articulated sentence that Aiden ever said, but that metaphor itself – not that the boy knew what a metaphor was, he simply crafted it with what stood out – was exposing him too much. 

“It’s the same thing.” Aiden insisted “I’m helping you.” 

After that, his first instinct was to immediately look at Maeve. She was the real threat and she knew him better than Logan did, she could catch him doing something wrong. Not that he was doing anything wrong, but Logan was Maeve’s toy to play with and not his, or so she thought. He could’ve easily stolen him, then she’d be outnumbered and unable to hurt him anymore. He’d be safe, because he could convince his father to kill her. Then they’d be free. Just him and daddy. 

As soon as they arrived home, Maeve locked Aiden in the closet. She must’ve been nervous because of Stavros, because she wasn’t able to handle him properly and she couldn’t afford to have her mistakes acknowledged. No matter how much her husband was an empty shell, he was too physically strong for her to go against him. It was a good moment to take advantage of and steal him, but in a competition with his mother Aiden didn’t have many chances of winning. He had to steal Logan without making it look like a competition. 

“Mommy?” 

“What do you want?!” she opened the door wide, to which Aiden looked in the main room with an alarmed expression. 

“Close the door.” He whispered, then continued as she complied “Does daddy know?” 

“About what?” 

“About your friend. I won’t tell him.” 

“He knows already. Heh, it was him who took you away from Stavros.” 

“Daddy saved me?” his eyes sparkled with happiness and a sudden warmth took over his chest. Logan saved him! He could bring him by his side! If he protected him from Stavros, then he could protect him Maeve as well. Finally things were looking up: if daddy just killed her then they could be together in complete safety, without following her orders, just the two of them living a new life. If the right choice of words was enough to bring Logan to life for a bit then freeing from the burden of that evil woman would make him happy and if he was happy he was going to start loving Aiden, realizing that he was not the problem. They could go live in a new place, maybe somewhere near the city where Aiden could go to kindergarten and make friends, but not too far from nature so that he could still see the birds. 

“…Yeah.” 

There was something unusual in Maeve’s expression, the way her mouth curved, the way the fire in her eyes was much quieter, like a dim candle. For the first time she was dubious, as if she wanted to say something but wasn’t sure on whether it was the case to say it – strange for someone only caring about herself. Aiden looked at her carefully in order to receive the words. What he could hear was ‘Maybe it’s just better like this. I hope it’s not going to bite me in the ass later.’ For some reason he felt the need to point out that he could get them, even if that could risk the warmth he was feeling. 

“Daddy arrived too late, didn’t he?” 

“What?” 

“That’s why it hurts. But it’s okay, he still took me away, right?” 

“…Right.” 

“So he did save me!” his eyes sparkled even more “Can I talk to him?” 

“I—” she interrupted herself with a sigh and then headed out “Sure.” 

She walked up to Logan in the main room, silently elbowing him and nodding towards the closet to get him to talk to his son. He rolled his eyes, exhaling through his nose, and came to his son dragging his feet on the floor. 

“What is it?” 

“Daddy!” the boy clang to him, hugging him tight. Logan simply lifted him and laid him on his bed. 

“Don’t make sudden moves. The doctor said you have to rest.” 

Aiden nodded and gave him a warm smile. That seemed to irritate him. 

“Ah, you’re happy now?! I’m not.” he hissed coldly “I lost a day at work because of you.” 

“Oh. I’m sorry, daddy.” 

“Sorry doesn’t bring food on the table.” 

Depends on who apologizes to whom, Aiden thought. Not that it could actually serve him in those circumstances. Work was very important to Logan – maybe the most important thing. It was the only thing he had to do, and the physical exhaustion that came with it could justify anything...Even the violent outbursts that he had, because anger was all he was able to express in a way that Maeve couldn’t contain, even if she was aware of her power over him to the point of not being afraid. His anger was always ‘towards the situation’, he would say, but Aiden knew that he was mad at Maeve. It was the moment to do something about it. 

“Was it mommy that called you?” 

“Yeah. You know how she is, she calls and I have to run immediately.” 

“Why?” 

“Wh--What do you mean ‘why’?” 

“You work, why does she decide?” 

“Because that’s how it works.” 

“Okay...But then why didn’t she want you to know?” he was aware that that was risky, Maeve have come for him, but he had to play on childish confusion. Asking adults about their flawed logic to have them question it only worked if the tone of the question implied that there were no wrong answers. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but it was obvious to him somehow, because as far as he knew an adult’s favourite pastime around children was always the validation of being right. “If she’s the one who told you...” 

“Who else should’ve she called?” he scoffed “The police?” 

Aiden shrugged “Well...Yeah.” 

“I can’t even begin to explain you how that would’ve gone wrong.” 

“Why?” Aiden tilted his head, at which Logan sighed rolling his eyes. 

“Nevermind. She called me anyway. Now you’re here.” 

“Thank you, daddy.” the boy instinctively hugged him, despite the fast jump not being healthy for him. 

“I told you not to move. Does it hurt?” 

“Yes, but it’s okay. I promise.” 

“Easy for you to say.” 

“Did that man hurt you?” 

“Huh?” 

“When you took me away from him. Did he fight? He was scary...” 

“Took you aw—Who told you this?” 

“Mommy did.” 

“Really?” 

“Yeah.” 

A moment of silence followed. 

“Wait here a minute.” he went in the main room to talk to Maeve “What’s this story?” 

“What was I supposed to say?” 

“I don’t know, but he’ll get attached to me and that’s last thing I need.” Logan sighed “Why did you even bother with all of this?” 

“Letting him die was not convenient in that situation. Stavros would’ve fucked me up and your dumb ass needs someone who’ll tell you to bring food to your mouth so that you don’t starve anyway.” 

“You think this is a fucking game, Maeve?!” Logan pushed her violently against the wall, making her hit her head. She let out a pained groan and kneed his crotch in self-defense. 

“If it’s a game the you’re losing, asshole. As always.” she let out a shrill laugh. To assert dominance, Aiden figured, but why was it necessary? Every protest was empty, just like the violent outbursts, there was no rebellion at all. He was perpetually the loser of that game “And it’s not like I told you to do it that way. I just saved your ass saying something that’s technically true, he’s the one blowing it out of proportion thinking that you saved him. This is your fault.” 

“My fault?!” Logan struggled to get up from the floor “My fault?! You are the one that let that bastard in our house!” 

“I do whatever the fuck I want. You better go with my version or take everything that comes to you: the little shit does not give up easily and if you really don’t want him around then he’s gonna give you a hard time and you know it.” 

Logan sighed. He must have thought that he couldn’t argue with that, but he was still not convinced, almost anxious. 

“What if he remembers all of a sudden? How do I explain him what happened?” 

“You don’t, you just lock him up until he forgets again.” 

“What does the doctor know? Did you talk to him? What did Aiden tell h--” 

“Relax. I talked to the doctor. Chose my words carefully, made sure he’s not telling anyone.” 

“How do you know for sure?” 

“He’s a pussy. He was terrified of me. He’s not going to do much with what he found out.” 

“So what do we do now?” 

“Nothing. I’ll watch Aiden more closely for a couple of weeks while he recovers, I’ll let you know if he remembers anything inconvenient.” 

“Like what?” Aiden asked out loud, demanding attention. They needed to stop talking about him like he wasn’t there when he could clearly hear them, always playing on the fact that ‘he couldn’t understand’. It was clear to him that whatever they were afraid of him remembering specifically, they were afraid of it. This was another one of those moments, if he said the right words he could save his own life. Yet something was still not right: did Logan save him or not? He acted like it wasn’t true, but Maeve did call him and make him lose one day at work. 

“That I arrived too late.” Logan replied strangely quickly, and meaning to do so. His tone was not as flat as usual, maybe even sad. He walked towards his son and patted his head. That contact made Aiden shiver, because he never received affection from his father but it was so unnatural. Without saying anything, he wanted to let him know that that gesture was so poorly faked that it made him angry, repeating ‘I know you’re lying, I know you’re lying, I know you’re lying about caring’ in his head until Logan could hear it in his, because it was unfair that he was lying to him and he could end him by simply saying a few words – he didn’t know which ones, but he could!   
...But he would also be punished for it. That was just how it worked. Keeping his hopes up sounded like asking for trouble. 

Yet it would have been nice to believe him, to think that he was actually sad for him, it would have been such a pretty feeling. Maybe like a flower: flowers just like thoughts and wishes could be of any colour and have many shapes, but ultimately they could never compare to something much bigger and more solid like a tree, childish hopes and dreams were nothing but something naïve to laugh at while watching from the tree of harsh reality of adults. Logan probably thought that he arrived too early instead of too late and wanted him dead. 

“Don’t worry.” the boy forced himself to reply “If it happens again, just stay at work. I don’t want to be a burden.” 

“A burden?” Logan looked confused, also a bit surprised by that response “Where did you even learn that word?” 

“Doesn’t matter.” laughed Maeve “It suits him.” 

“Maeve--” 

“Daddy, it’s okay--” 

“Look.” something changed in Logan’s voice. It became more serious, more sincere, even if there was nothing to compare it with to make sure, he was taking a weight off his chest “I’m sorry.” 

“You don’t have to be.” 

“But it’s my fault.” 

“Logan...!” Maeve gasped immediately, as if to ask him what was the plan, and Aiden too was surprised. Why weren’t they blaming him this time? It was always his fault for existing. She was alarmed for the first time during a conversation. Maybe she was afraid of Logan saying something she couldn’t keep up with, but how was him arriving late the same thing as what she did? Maybe he sensed that Aiden was by his side, wanting to be saved but also to save him from Maeve? Or was he asking for help? He probably was. Leaving his wife would’ve been easier without children around, so that was why he didn’t want any. He didn’t hate Aiden, he hated the inability to escape and the boy was relieved to realize that. Maybe he even cared and actually felt guilt, but he did do so much already. Daddy saved me, now I will save him. He had an idea, but he had to wait. 

“Mommy?” 

“Ugh, what is it?” 

“I need to go to the bathroom.” 

“Can’t you just hold it in?” 

“It’s not that. I have to wash to go to sleep.” 

“You didn’t have dinner yet. I’ll make you some veggies.” 

Aiden nodded without saying anything. The rest of the evening proceeded quietly, with no more arguments, probably because both his parents were too tired to think of measuring their words carefully. The boy’s dinner was a couple of frozen spinach cubes from the freezer, Maeve cooked them with some oil in a frying pan but didn’t bother to check if they were completely defrosted. They didn’t taste good but Aiden wasn’t the type of child that complained about food, mostly because he would barely receive any on a lucky day. Now he was being fed because the doctors insisted, but that didn’t make sense: why would they follow the doctors’ orders when they never cared about his health? They could’ve just left him die, it was what they always said they wanted after all...And then all of a sudden Logan cared. Why? It was obvious that something else must have happened to cause that sudden change of behaviour, but Aiden liked to think that his father realized how much he loved him once he saw him in danger and was afraid to lose him. Either way, he had to return the favour and prove he was worth it, he had to save him from Maeve.   
He made sure to fall asleep early so that could wake up in the middle of the night. 

Standing was not easy and his legs kept shaking, begging him to go back to bed, but his whole lower half wouldn’t stop aching anyway, so he had to sneak in the main room. It hurt so much to tiptoe to reach the phone, but he had to hold on. As he managed to take it in his hands, he started wondering what to do next: the doors that led outside was locked and he wasn’t strong enough to move a chair under the window to escape, but if he remained still in place while making the phone call then he had to be fast and say the right words, which was even harder than usual not knowing exactly what happened. How was he supposed to word it? ‘Mommy is evil and brought a man to hurt me and she forces daddy to do everything she wants’? That was the only thing that came to his mind, or at least the only one that made sense. There was no time, he had to go with it. 

“911, what’s your emergency?” 

“I--” his legs failed and he fell on the floor, the phone too hit it with a loud noise falling just out of the child’s reach. He dragged himself for a couple of meters and finally reached it, but in doing so he accidentally pressed a button. 

“911, what’s your emergency?” repeated the operator on the other side, now on loudspeaker. Aiden panicked and ended the call, now he was holding the phone to his chest and shaking, knowing that he was going to get caught. He tried to stand up again, but he couldn’t; he had to leave the phone there and crawl back in the closet but they were never going to believe that ‘the phone just fell’, so he kept dragging himself on the floor. Every movement caused him more pain, to the point that he couldn’t even hold himself back from crying. He started to think he was going to die on that floor. It was probably better for everyone there, if Logan wanted to leave with no regrets now he could. It was Maeve’s fault, he could finally blame her, all Aiden had to was close his eyes and let everything go. Return the favour, sacrifice for daddy and he will be happy and then he will love me. 

After a while he felt arms lifting him; he kept his eyes squeezed closed but he could recognize his father’s hands holding him, feeling his eyes on him. He wondered if they were still empty, he wanted to imagine them full of love, and with his breath feeling closer he was hoping for a kiss, but instead the mouth went closer to the ear. He’s going to thank me, he’s going to tell me that everything will be fine, Aiden told himself, but reality ensued immediately. 

~○~ 

“I know you can hear me.” Logan whispered in his ear “If you ever, ever dare to speak again, I will kill you with my own hands.” 

“But daddy...!” he opened his eyes and looked at his father only to see the same empty, merciless stare “I just wanted to save you.” 

“YOU DON’T KNOW ANYTHING!” he suddenly shouted. Aiden was scared but he couldn’t free himself from the grip and all he could do was desperately look around as his father inevitably carried him to his room. He threw the boy onto his bed, waking up Maeve. 

“What are you doing?” 

“Hand me my belt. I need to teach him a lesson.” 

“At 2am?!” she whined “What the fuck happened?” 

“He called 911.” 

“WHAT?!” suddenly, she was completely awake as well “HOW?!” 

“I don’t know, but luckily for us he didn’t say anything.” he sighed with relief, fetching his belt himself “We still can’t afford this happening again, though.” 

“NO, _ SHE _ CAN’T!” Aiden yelled without thinking about it “YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS!” 

“It’s the only thing I can do.” he replied coldly as he laid the first hit. Aiden screamed, but he didn’t care, he just kept hitting him with the belt. He didn’t even care about the bruises anymore - he wanted to see them, actually. Because Aiden was in debt, he owed him his life and how he was taking it, but why? Didn’t he believe his son could save him? Perhaps he was even scared, because Maeve was much smarter than him and the child being by his side was no guarantee. He was following her commands before she even gave them, until she spoke: 

“Don’t kill him, I need him alive.” Maeve’s voice sounded so painfully unimpressed that Aiden wanted to scream even more, she even yawned afterwards “I’m going to take a nap on the couch, lock him back in the closet and wake me up when you’re done.” 

Logan simply nodded as his wife left the room. Aiden tried to look in his eyes, trying to get something out of them, but the pain wouldn’t let him focus. He would have given everything to know what the was he was thinking, to know that he thought that this was the only way and that he could be convinced. He had to be thinking that. 

“Daddy...!” he begged “Please, stop!” 

Nothing. He kept going, this time even harder. 

“Please, it hurts!” 

“QUIET!” Logan yelled “I SAID NEVER SPEAK AGAIN OR I’LL KILL YOU!” 

At that point he went quiet, not saying anything and doing his best to stay silent as he kept getting beaten up, but inevitably he cried. He wanted to ask why, but even if he could there was no point in doing it. The tears clouded his vision and his father was nothing more than a blurred figure with no face or human shape at all. If his mother turned into a demon, his father turned into a shadow, and he too looked like he wasn’t even there. Because no matter how much Aiden had called him to beg him, he wouldn’t really listen, and now that he was forced to stay silent he was just staring at a shadow inching closer and closer every moment, but feeling so far away. Maybe the real Logan, the one that could have loved his son, was in fact far away, and maybe after the burning pain of the belt on his skin Aiden was going to see him come back. Or rather, see him for the first time. Perhaps he just had to wait, but in the end he just lost consciousness. 

~○~ 

The following days went on silently as he spent them confined in his bed with the only exceptions being bathroom breaks. Even the restricted area of his whole house and backyard looked like freedom compared to the closet. It was the entire world, after all. Everything he wanted now was to be healthy enough to sit among the grass outside again, he didn’t even feel like flying away anymore. Because even if he flew, where would he go? What would he do? He was too small and weak to provide for himself and the fact that he didn’t even want it, that he wanted to be a kid, was a sign that he wasn’t fit to escape after all. He wanted to be in a cozy nest and nothing else, exploring the world knowing what others behaved like was not only terrifying but felt like a chore. Even the idea of even speaking again felt like a chore to the point that in some moments he was glad that his survival depended on it. Logan would beat him regardless, either because Maeve ordered him to or because he had just argued with her. In either case, her recommendation was always the same, ‘don’t kill him, I need him alive’. For what, Aiden had no idea. Surely nothing good, yet one day she looked willing to let go of whatever her plan was: 

“You know what? Fuck it. He’s recovered enough, take him on a trip.“ 

“A trip?” 

“Yeah. It’s father’s day.” 

“It’s 11pm, I don’t want to go anywhere, much less with him!” 

“Oh, don’t worry. Just for this time and then you won’t have to do it again, if you know what I mean...” 

“You said we needed him here.” he replied sternly. 

“I’ll find another way.” Maeve shrugged like it wasn’t a big deal “Get the little shit out of my sight, I’ve been watching him for weeks.” 

“But--” 

“_ Do it _.” 

“Fine.” he sighed “I’m not changing him though.” 

“Alright. I’ll see you later.” 

Logan groaned. He truly didn’t want to go out, but he couldn’t be angry at Maeve, so he decided to display his anger through heavy steps as he headed to the closet, grabbing the child roughly and carrying him to the car. Aiden was scared, but he wasn’t allowed to speak, so he remained frozen.   
After a few miles he did, however, figure that those rules were only important at home. It was a good moment to talk him into changing his mind – not that he could do anything else, anyway, with the rain still pouring and blurring the already pitch black view out of the windows. 

“Daddy, where are you taking me?” 

“I don’t know yet.” 

“Are you lost?” pretending not to know gave him the opportunity to ask all the question he wanted. This was the farthest he’d even been from Maeve in a while and she couldn’t do anything about what he was going to do. He didn’t know what her plan was, but she didn’t even know he had a plan. This question would have triggered something in Logan, he just knew. 

“No.” his father gritted through his teeth. 

“Then we can go wherever you want.” seeing him grunt ambiguously feigning distraction, Aiden continued “We can go someplace where mommy can’t find us. Just me and you.” 

Logan’s expression saddened, he seemed tempted to stop the vehicle. He spoke only after a while. 

“I told you that you mustn’t speak.” 

“I won’t tell anyone about what happened. I promise.” 

“Why would I depend on the promises of a child?” Logan replied in what he must have thought was a dismissive tone, but he forgot to scoff and Aiden could hear how desperate he was. 

“Because I want you to be okay, not mommy.” 

Logan’s breath hitched. For that sentence to be so unexpected, he must’ve felt lonely. Something on his face, maybe his tired wrinkles, seemed to want to tell that the only reason to believe that his son was actually concerned for him was because children were stupid and incapable to understand adults. Aiden could perceive that and insisted: 

“Not just now, always. Forever.” 

“You don’t know anything.” he continued in complete disillusion. 

“Then tell me!” 

“You won’t understand.” 

“But I will listen.” 

Logan bit his lip. This was probably humiliating for him, he snapped his tongue in annoyance. Aiden wondered what was the reason of that much resistance. Things were going to be fine, for once, Logan just had to relax and escape with him. 

“Only because I hit you.” 

“No. I care.” 

His father inhaled through his nose, eyes squeezed close. 

“There’s no point in going anywhere, she’d find me.” 

“Not really.” 

“She always finds a way, trust me on this. There’s no point...Heh.” a bitter smile appeared on his face “Even if she died, I’m sure she would come back to haunt me.” 

“She can do that?!” 

Logan laughed at the child’s genuine confusion. Or maybe it wasn’t genuine. Well, nobody ever bothered to explain him how death worked, and with the fear that Maeve instilled in both of them it felt more and more like a legitimate question. Mostly because Aiden felt like he didn’t know the answer, but if she couldn’t then he could use that to convince his father. 

“No, it’s just...A saying.” 

“So if you kill her she won’t come back?” the boy tilted his head. 

“No.” 

“Are you going to kill her, then?” Aiden failed to hide his excitement at that idea, making his usually tiny voice come out with an odd vibe to it, sneaky, almost sultry. He didn’t feel guilty about that thought, Maeve had no redeeming qualities and if she died everything would have improved immediately. The only reason why he had never attempted to kill her himself, he thought, was that he was too small and weak to actually do it, and a failed attempt would have brought terrible consequences. Oh, but Logan should have definitely given it a shot. Maeve would be terrified of him if he only bothered to threaten her life seriously, anyway. 

“WHAT?! WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU ASK ME THAT?!” for some reason, he was completely freaked out by that question. Him, who would threaten an innocent five years old child at every minor occasion. Why he preferred Maeve to his son, Aiden could never fully understand. It was just outrageous. He had to point it out in some way. 

“Because you don’t mind killing me.” 

“I...What?” 

“I’m not mean to you.” 

“I...I don’t understand what you’re saying, you’re completely crazy.” he started driving faster all of a sudden, frantically pressing his foot on the pedal. He must have wanted to get it all over with, which irritated his son. For once that he could be saved, he was refusing to do his part. 

“It doesn’t matter how fast you go.” 

“What is that even supposed to mean?!” 

“We have to be together, daddy.” 

“Hah! You’ll see!” Logan shook his head quite violently, maybe to snap out of that feeling of creepiness, grounding himself and going back to his usual cold and ruthless self “I’ll take you so far you won’t find me anymore. You’ll be dead by tomorrow!” 

“You know I’m right.” Aiden protested “We will be okay without mommy. If we escape now, she will go to her friend.” 

A rumbling thunder outside followed. Rain started to fall copiously, drumming against the windows and windshield of the car. Logan stayed silent, keeping his fast driving despite the weather. 

“Daddy, please...” the child’s tone went back to its innocent, unfortunately sad tone. 

“It’s not as easy as you think it is.” the fact that he was giving up was even more audible than usual in his voice “If I run away with you, she’ll call the police. She’ll blame me for what happened to you and so they will look for us. They will find us.” 

“But you saved me...It’s not fair...” 

~○~ 

“I know that it’s not fair.” he spat back, he seemed very uncomfortable with the word ‘save’. It was like he refused to admit that the mere concept of saving and being saved existed. Were his hopes really lost to that point? “The only way I can escape her is by dying, honestly...” 

That last part of his response surprised Aiden. He was always willing to escape, but he never considered death as a way to escape, he would look at the birds in the sky and hope they’d take him to a safe place, that they would take him on adventures all around the world because he hadn’t had the chance to see it yet, but nothing about death. He didn’t want to live, but he wasn’t suicidal, the thought of taking his life never entered his mind, but somehow what his father said felt like a revelation. If Logan killed him, then he would be free. Killing could have been an act of love. He knew that, because had he had the strength, he would definitely kill Maeve for daddy. Then the birds would take him to heaven. Yes. Yes, he wanted to be killed, to be eaten, to be set free. Like a bird out of a rusty cage, he could spread his wings and reach the clouds, breathe the air that was always taken away from him. He would be in heaven, without Maeve – she deserved to remain anchored in the dirt and not fly, so it was perfect. Just him and daddy, safe in heaven. The car just needed to speed up... 

“I don’t mind dying if it’s with you.” the boy’s voice sounded distant in contemplation “Please, go faster...” 

Logan complied, but he was starting to feel reluctant about that command. 

“We’re going to crash if I keep going faster.” 

“I know.” Aiden replied coldly, again sounding oddly unchildlike. “Go faster.” 

“You know that we can’t go back, right?” 

“Yeah. That’s why I want to go faster.” 

Logan flinched like he felt a shiver down his spine. That sentence hit too close. “Me too.” 

“Then let’s go...” 

“Alright.” 

The car sped up. The rain fell more and more heavily, making the already dark streets become a blurred blob before their eyes, and its noise was blending with...Well, with everything: the engine, the quiet electric whistle of the lights, Aiden’s heart pounding in his chest, everything. The occasional lights on the street too were blurred and blending with the dark blob, becoming one with the sounds as well, like a huge black tidal wave flooding the world and drowning everything in it, cleaning it for the birds to take to heaven later, he could feel it so vividly that he could see it, and when it came closer it was just too good that the car finally ending up out of the street and spinning was like the wave was welcoming it – them, both of them – in its cold purifying embrace. 

The loudness of the hits told the child otherwise, making him feel the fear that he would always feel in his house whenever he heard a loud noise. He preferred to think that it was a good fear, because of the excitement of the freedom he was about to meet, but as soon as the car stopped and he found himself alive on the ground all the regret came up at once. 

“DADDY!” he crawled immediately towards his father laying a couple of feet from him, not minding the broken glass nor his own sleeping clothes being soaking wet, shaking him “DADDY!” 

Logan didn’t move. Aiden started shaking in pure panic. He couldn’t recognize where he was and there was only a single, malfunctioning street light barely lighting the place. No one in sight, either. It was all his fault, what was he going to do now? 

“DADDY, WAKE UP!” he cried “PLEASE, WAKE UP!” 

“A--” Logan whispered as he strived to open his eyes, which looked strangely relaxed “Aiden...” 

“Daddy, I’m here.” he took his hand “Are you okay?” 

For the first time, Logan smiled at his son. He was free. “Thank you...” 

“NO!” the boy cried desperately “DON’T GO WITHOUT ME, DADDY, PLEASE! PLEASE!” 

“I’m still here.” Logan panted, groaning in pain as he tried to move. In the end he found the strength to sit up. He looked fine except for a few bruises and scratches. Aiden hugged him immediately, as tight as he can. Logan’s heart too was pounding, he could hear it with his head on his chest. He was glad that he wasn’t being pushed away. 

“Don’t leave me...” 

“I know you’re scared. I’m scared too, but...” Logan looked down at his son, gently patting his head “I have to go.” 

“Wh--What? Where?” 

“I have to go home.” 

“Without me?!” 

“It’s probably for your own good.” 

“But it’s cold here!” 

“I know.” Logan sounded choked up, but still firm in his decision of leaving him here in the rain. Aiden couldn’t help but keep crying silently at that betrayal. They were supposed to run away, they were supposed to die together. “Look, I’m sorry for everything I’ve done to you, I just...I just can’t help it.” 

“Why not?” 

“Because I don’t want to stop. It’s all I have.” 

“But...!” 

“If you stay here, I won’t hurt you anymore, nor will mommy. I promise.” 

“I don’t mind if you hurt me.” Aiden pleaded “Just take me with you.” 

“No.” Logan insisted while slowly getting up “I don't know what you think happened, but it’s not true. What that man tried to do to you...It’s my fault, it’s all my fault.” 

“It’s mommy’s fault.” 

“Heh...” the man shed a tear “That too.” 

“Daddy?” Aiden called him as he started slowly walking away, Logan didn’t turn but nodded to tell him he was listening “Is it my fault too?” 

“...Yes.” he responded after a long while. 

“What did I do?” 

“We still don’t know what’s wrong with you. We just wanted you to be normal.” 

~○~ 

Aiden remained frozen hearing those words. The tears were now copious as he started crying uncontrollably, but his father still didn’t turn and still kept going, leaving him alone in that unknown place. With the tears blurring his vision and his father out of sight, the child could only keep laying on the ground and hope that the birds would bring him to heaven. 

He woke up the next morning in the same spot. The cityside could be seen at the horizon, but it was still too far away. There were quite a few trees, but it wasn’t near the forest area either – there were apparently many in the Florida Panhandle where he lived, it must have been still somewhere in the suburbs. The car of course was still there, broken glass and muddy streaks from the tires onto the cold pavement. One of the doors must have fallen off during the night, too.   
Aiden was free, now, and he could go wherever he wanted. Maybe that was what was he had to do for his own safety, run away on his own, because daddy didn’t want to be saved. Perhaps if he found a way to go to the police he could explain and Maeve could’ve gotten what she deserved...And yet... 

He just wanted to go home. After spending the night out in the cold, completely alone and wetted by the rain, he missed his closet all of a sudden. He hated it, but it was his only guarantee. If he had to die, he wanted to die in a cozier environment, he concluded as if he didn’t wish to never wake up from the crash in the first place. It was odd how fast his thoughts kept spinning; he knew they were his weapons against whatever was being thrown at him, but they often would go out of control and spiral, always wishing for violence, for something bad to happen...But that was what he was used to, wasn’t it? Of course his inner voice was going to be scary, it was warning him of the dangers that were indeed around him. He had never met another child, and the happy families he saw on TV were fake, so other children must have gone through that as well and their inner voices would be scary as well. It must have been normal – it didn’t _ feel _ normal to him, but what did he know? 

He climbed back to where the car was before crashing. There wasn’t anybody around, not even cars, so he could observe undisturbed. It was too dark when he was in the car, and he couldn’t recognize many visual cues, but he remembered paying attention to every turn that the car took. He wasn’t sure if he was going to manage, but he had at least to try. For the car to move to cover its own length, he figured he had to take about five or six steps. At first he wasn’t convinced due to the car speeding up, but that part of the road was mostly straight ahead and when he arrived to a light that he remembered passing the night before he felt more confident about where he was. He turned around to match the direction of the car and closed his eyes, slowly walking backwards, not losing his focus not even for a second – and he was tempted to, he had always he wanted the birds to take him on an adventure, to see the world - because he had to go home. He had to see daddy again. 

It took him a long while, but at last he arrived. He spied from a window with the shutters left open to see inside, but there was no trace of Logan, he must have left for work already. Maeve wasn’t there either, she must have gone...He didn’t know, actually, nor care. She was simply ‘somewhere’. Probably with Stavros, or maybe even someone else – yes, it must have been someone else, as far as Aiden knew the last time she saw Stavros was when he attacked him. Only because they were having a disagreement about...Whatever the hell they were talking about. Plus Maeve had many friends for some reason, despite being so obnoxious. They had to be at least as evil as she was, to enjoy her company, but it didn’t really matter. 

The boy managed to access his backyard, taking some time to finally sit among the grass again. The mud was dirtying him, but it wasn’t like he was clean after spending an entire night out in the rain. He wondered how was it possible that he didn’t catch a cold. Now he would wait for daddy to come back, make sure he was alright, and in the meantime he would look at the sky to watch the birds. A pigeon flew from a tree onto the ground next to him. 

“Birdie!” 

He tackled the pigeon and successfully trapped it in his arms, holding it tight. The bird struggled in his grip. 

“Please don’t leave, you have to take me and daddy away!” 

The pigeon kept struggling to flap its wings, becoming more and more alarmed by the child’s behaviour. In the end it turned around and clawed him on the cheek, making him let out a scream. 

“Why?!” Aiden cried out loud “I thought you were my friend!” 

The pigeon started to fly away, but he didn’t give up so easily. He picked up a rock and ran, throwing the rock at it. 

“I HATE YOU!” 

  
~○~ 

The rock hit the pigeon and it fell down quickly, its cracking bones could be heard. Aiden felt a mixture of fear and excitement, similar to when the car crashed, and ran to the bird to see it. He wanted to watch it die, just to see what it was like.   
It was bleeding from its beak and it seemed to have trouble breathing. It seemed to be in great pain, unable to fly. Aiden figured he should feel sorry, but why? He felt like that every single moment of his life and birdie refused to help him and daddy. They could’ve been all happy together but birdie had to be mean for no reason and put him in danger. It was a bad bird.   
It was the meanest bird he met, but it wasn’t big, and if his household taught him something was that whenever the smallest one dared to disobey they were asking for trouble, for a punishment, and after all he went through it was finally his turn to dish some punishment. Plus, if he practised on that pigeon, he would finally be able to punish Maeve when he grew up. Then he could save daddy and daddy would love him. 

He took another rock and used all his strength to smash it together with the other one in order to create a spark. When the flame started, the pigeon emitted a tired yet agonizing lament, and an awful smell pervaded the air as its feathers started melting. The fire spread across its small body very quickly, flames high like a phoenix’s would be. The burning pain, the despair, it was all so familiar, but although those sensations were terrifying themselves Aiden found relief in seeing them from the outside, somehow proving that they were real, and if they were outside of him then he didn’t have to feel them anymore. It was a bad birdie, anyway.   
Yet the temptation to listen to that little voice that told him to put his hands in the fire was too strong, and he did listen. Holding the rocks still tight in his little hands, he used them to hit the dying bird like he was stabbing it, feeling the fire and the boiling feathers around him, hearing the delightful sound of its bones and organs crushing, over and over until it became a puddle of nothing, and it felt _good_. 

~○~ 

He could feel the warmth of the smoke all over his body, even on the inside, almost in a cathartic way. All the bad things he saw and experienced were finally dying and being burnt away, and he too was burning on the inside, feeling light and outside of his body. He wanted that too to become a puddle of nothing, and his soul to arise with the smoke. He would be with the birdie, in heaven, finally free. Daddy was coming next. 


	4. Come to mommy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiden reminisces his past in his office when he has already started to work with patients. He spends time with his partner, Camille. Being a prodigy, however, did not erase some childish traits and trains of thought.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a bit of a lighter break from the previous ones. It still has dark elements in its own way, though.
> 
> Warnings for this chapter: unwanted physical contact (could border on assault depending on perspective), misogyny, intrusive thoughts.

Upon seeing the birdie’s little feathers curl up as they melted, upon hearing the pained screeches and breathing in the foul smell, Aiden learned that it didn’t have to be him burning to resurrect from the ashes like a phoenix. The flames were to be something majestic before him, celebrating life, this game that was only unfair to those who were losers; and that day, he won for the first time.    
In some way, the birdie helped him because it was giving him a sign, permission to be something other than a prey. He, too, was allowed to be on the other side. From now on, whenever he saw something smaller than him, it was a ray of hope.    
They wouldn’t send him to kindergarten, anyway, so he had to play and learn in his own way and what was better than training so that he could save daddy? He was going to become good at it. Yes, he was going to become good at it, he decided as he stared at the fire fondly.

“Are you okay, baby?” a soft voice distracted him from the fireplace he was staring at, and a large pair of arms was now wrapped around him, hugging him from behind. He threw his head back, looking at his partner in the eyes. They were a warm dark brown, a colour similar to coffee’s, warm as her tanned skin. The long dark curls of her hair reaching him, almost tickling him a little bit. She always looked very kind.

  
“I’m fine.” he replied with a timid smile, not really in the mood for talking. She gently kissed his forehead in an almost motherly fashion, like any other woman who was older than twice his age would do, then turned back to him as he called her “Camille?”

“Yeah?”

“Is the patient here yet?”

“No, not yet. I just saw you lost in your thoughts, and, you know...”

“Oh, it’s nothing. I was...Reminiscing something, that’s all.”

“Reminiscing something?” she raised an eyebrow, for some reason she wasn’t very convinced.

“Mhmhm. From about fifteen years ago.”

“Were you even old enough to remember anything fifteen years ago?” she laughed quietly “You’re so small...”

“I was five.” he shrugged, extending his hands a little to feel the warm air rising “Then is when I discovered my fondness for fire.”

“ Wanna go cook me something, then?” she playfully kissed his ear, probably in an attempt to make him loosen up while waiting for the patient, but she didn’t seem to succeed.

“You’re not that old.” he emitted flatly as he shrugged, then snapped out of his thoughts and turned towards her properly. She sat onto the  king sized bed, giving him a smirk that was demanding that he got under the covers as she mouthed ‘bring me something hot’, so he nodded “I will make you some coffee, if that’s alright for you. There isn’t enough time for food.”

“Sure.”

Aiden looked around the room for a moment, just to make sure that thinking too hard about the past wouldn’t have it magically  dissolve once he exited. It was arranged like a standard hotel room, with the shelves left empty and not even one personal object in the way. Aside from the wooden furniture in contrast with the white walls, the warmth was provided only by the fireplace and the red quilt that Camille picked for the bed. The bedroom next to it, that was another story entirely, but he didn’t want to think about it, he wanted to focus on the small task of making coffee.

The dark boiserie on the walls followed him for the whole corridor, a few wooden frames meaning to mirror its design only to provide contrast with the colorful abstract pictures inside whose mere presence was a chore. It was a way to make the apartment look professional without looking dull. The bedroom where Camille was, too, was meant to be available to a patient in need – or at least, that was Aiden’s original plan. 

The main area of that apartment was clearly the living room, which he had adapted into an office where he received his patients. It was complete with a comfortable couch that could become a bed - blue like the rest of the colorful touches in the room, a couple of plants, a table for conversation and a bigger one for crafts if the situation required it. Onto his desk he would have a bonsai tree, too. For the rest, besides the obligatory shelves with tons of books that were mostly meant to take up space rather than be read since he had always studied online anyway, the walls were decorated by yet more abstract paintings and a few framed degrees.    
At first he had started hanging all of them, but he seemed to grow increasingly embarrassed by the monstrous amount of them which would take an entire wall and perhaps even more. Besides the medicine and psychology related ones, he wouldn’t flaunt the others much. The important ones, he thought, were the titles of master of science in nursing and occupational therapy. Had a master of arts in sociology and developmental studies also hanging nearby to hint that there was something else but without having to actually show them. He was a bit self-conscious about how much time on his hands he had had in order to obtain all those academic titles, mostly because nobody ever loved him enough to make him possibly use his time differently. 

The apartment was actually quite cramped, the entrance corridor that served as a waiting room was narrow enough for Aiden to have to put in regular small chairs in there instead of more comfortable armchairs, and the tiny kitchen used to be part of the living room but it was divided through a sliding screen, made look as aseptic as possible. The patients could easily see that there was a kitchen and he liked it that way, he wanted somehow to let them know that they could be guests and eat there for the day if they had no place to go, but still present it in a cold enough way to make them understand that it was a perfectly professional environment and that he was merely doing them a  favour by having those options available, because they were such pitiable creatures. Truth was, he lived there. He lived there and slipping a subtle insult to whoever entered for needing to be there made him feel a little better about being forced to live in his own cramped office and not affording to go anywhere else. 

Finally, he filled a cup of coffee for Camille as soon as it was ready. She liked it with a bit of milk and one spoonful of sugar. It was always interesting to him how common coffee consumption was even among those who didn’t like it. People who didn’t like chocolate simply wouldn’t bother having any, but with coffee it was different because while it too was addictive it was needed to be productive, to be awake, but almost no one could tolerate its actual taste – too dark, too bitter, why would anyone who wants to be happy get near anything like that, et cetera - so it had to be modified into something blander and sweeter in order to make people function. It was him as a beverage. How pathetic...Of them! He didn’t need coffee to function despite all the hardships he went through, he had his  neverending nightmares keeping him awake like an actual  morigerate person. To be this much better than everyone truly was a burden, sometimes.

“Camille, here’s your  cof \--” the cup soon shattered on the floor, the beverage spilled everywhere. Aiden paled, shaking a little but trying to look collected. The woman tilted her head: she couldn’t understand, everything was perfectly normal to her.

~○~

She must have thought that was going to be a nice surprise for him, to find her in lingerie waiting for him on the bed. The lacy white underwear too tight on her body, her bra looking like it was ready to explode. Her breasts so large, so unnecessarily meaty, looking more bloated with every breath, he hated them. He could already see them bounce, he could hear them, he just wanted her to cover those disgusting things already.

“I know you’re inexperienced, but I thought you’d already seen a pair before.” the grin on her face made him clench his fists, it made him want to make all that unnecessary flesh bleed by slashing it all over with the first sharp object he could find, like the slaughterhouse pig she looked. Why would she do that? Why the hell would she show him her breasts ready to bounce when he still couldn’t get the image of Maeve’s out of his head?!

“Cover them.” he just spat out, at first with his voice cracking and then more decisive, commanding “Cover them  _ now _ .”

“Aiden.” she got up from bed, having the nerve to get closer to him when every movement made him feel sick to his stomach “How am I supposed to teach you if you don’t know what my whole body looks like?”

“We can still do it if you have a shirt on...” he mumbled, glancing away because while a part of him wanted to lash out he knew that it was not convenient and that he had to contain himself; yet Camille got even closer and put a hand on the back of his head, pushing his face between her breasts. He tried to get away, but in pushing her he squeezed them, hearing her muffled moan and her heartbeat, smelling a perfume so strong mixing with a sweat drop, and one breast came out. Nipples hard yet somehow pruny, he hated that texture and a tear formed in his eye as he could _taste_ all of it as it was forced in his mouth. Yet, she insisted.   
  
“Come to mommy...”

_ Come to mommy. _

_ Come to mommy. _

_ Come to mommy. _

_ Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy. Mommy.  _

It echoed in his head in loop, like that little voice inside of him that taunted him whenever he had an inconvenient thought as a small child, it echoed fast and the world was spinning and his blood was boiling, bile coming up. He wanted to bite that disgusting nipple off, hear the bitch scream, spill all her blood. She was another shapeless mountain of flesh, trembling like the most hideous and blob of nothing, oils from her skin feeling slippery, almost greasy, awful.  Finally he pulled away, not without failing to hold back a quiet yelp.

  
~○~   


“What is it?”

“I...” he gasped for air “I don’t want to...I can’t.” he glanced away, looking for words to explain – or rather, to deflect – but he was still shaking and his head was still spinning. To think that she was probably convinced she was doing something good for him, even if she didn’t know the cause nor the severity of the problem, it was just enraging. Enraging, because by not knowing, somehow, she knew. She knew that this young man she was dating was inexperienced yet demanded – very specifically – not to see her breasts, it was just too easy to make speculations. Speculations that she shouldn’t be making for her own good. Aiden swore for a moment that he was going to kill her as that fear passed through his mind.

He could already hear her thoughts: _aww, what could he have ever gone through to have that terrified reaction? Something horrible, which he clearly hasn’t overcome yet, why did no one help this helpless boy? The poor wounded child needed an adult, then he was not allowed any control for his own good. Because a baby would starve without his mother breastfeeding him and he was just being difficult. Maybe it was endearing, because with a bit of time she could get him to behave the way she wanted. Because, she said that, he was so small. Small, cute, innocent looking scared boy who needed to be fixed just right!_   
No matter how many years passed, his body was always so small and weak and easy to take advantage of. And her lips kept moving, but only incomprehensible muffled noises came out of them, he couldn’t bear to have pitiful words thrown in his way by someone so ready to--

“Aiden, can you hear me?” she put her hands on his shoulders, as if to prepare to shake him “I’m talking to you.”

“Camille...The coffee--”

“Don’t worry about the coffee, I’ll clean it up.”

“Alright.”

Camille picked up the broken cup from the floor, raising her head to look at him “Did I scare you?”

“A little bit.” he admitted, although he tried to hide any hint of shock in his voice “You see, I have been...Confronted with...An  unpleasant situation, in the past.”

He hoped that those words would be enough to explain without actually disclosing the details. He hated being pitied, but he still found it more than appropriate to remind people of what justified his reactions. It was a mere safety measure and besides others could use some boundaries.

“I wish you told me. I understand why you didn’t, but...I wouldn’t have done that if I knew--” she interrupted herself by shaking her head “Ah, no, that’s not right. I shouldn’t have either way. I’m fifty years old, I should have known better. I’m sorry.”

She seemed genuinely sorry, which was good. Now he was going to have to find a swift solution so that she would never dare again. He considered crying, but that would have been so wasteful when he could so easily save that for later, just in case she ‘slipped’ again. He’d pair it with a heartfelt ‘I trusted you’ and she’d beg him for another chance, because no one wants to be treated like a monster towards children, not even actual monsters, but especially women. He thought that women had this seemingly fascinating, actually tedious tendency to take in broken men ‘with the intention to nurse them back to health’ to pat themselves on the back for the good work or, in the majority of cases, to whine about how their good work was going to waste because they were being too generous, too empathetic, too above their ungrateful partner who would always be ‘aggressive for no reason’. How ironic to see such  behaviour in most of his female patients who were so blatant about their desperate request of being fixed by someone else?

Then again, he was at the very beginning of his relationship with Camille, more specifically a stage full of meaningless talk and awkward foreplay without anything else but a professional relationship as she would note his appointments, so perhaps she didn’t mean to come across as someone with that kind of personality although she was highly likely to fall into that. There  _ had _ to be something interesting under those disgusting meaty breasts, after all, so he just responded shyly making himself look smaller on purpose:

“Why did you do that?”

“You said you wanted me to push you a bit further, the other day, and well...I want to be the one you get comfortable with, the one with who you can have all the adventures and experiences you should be able to have. Not because you have to, but because you deserve to have that opportunity.”

“I see...Thank you.”

“Listen, if you want to break up after this I understand, I just--” she heard the ringing from a call in the other room “Hold on a second.”

Aiden glanced down at the floor as she quickly ran in the reception corridor, staring at the spilled coffee. He felt a bitter aftertaste in his mouth, but he knew that he managed that interaction quite well. He would always put extra care in everything he did, and the fact that Camille too found the perfect words enticed him for a moment. She learned something from him, and it was quite pleasing, but on the other hand that might have been just her saying what he wanted to hear – and the fact that she had possibly figured what he wanted to hear was not pleasing at all. That better be beginner’s luck, he thought. The idea of her figuring out his real thoughts, feelings, wants or needs was something that deeply disturbing, because she would’ve quickly flown away from him upon discovering his unmasked darkness. He truly was like coffee, and she only liked her coffee with some milk inside. Hence the breast feeding! How fun it still was, the game of spotting patterns, no matter if he was five or twenty.

“Goodwill's appointment for today has been declined.” announced Camille as she walked back in with a rag, kneeling to clean the coffee. For some reason, despite them looking hideous to him, Aiden couldn’t help but lower his glance down to her breasts. The way they were dangling had him wonder how those would move during actual intercourse, since the other pairs of breasts he had seen so far were considerably smaller. He shook his head immediately at that thought. An image popped in his mind answering his questions immediately, and he was mad at himself for making himself mad. Perhaps one day he would be able to overcome this issue and become normal enough to handle it properly. He thoroughly disliked not being able to handle situations, especially being aware of how smart he was.

“I believe that was the last one, today.”

“Yes. We could go for a walk and then eat out?”

“I’d like to, but maybe we should do that later. I’m a bit tired from the last patient.”

“Oh yeah, I bet. She couldn’t stop yapping!”

“Camille...”

“Just kidding. So, uh, you’re going to take a nap?”

“Yes. I need to rest for a while.”

“Alright.” she bit her lip, pondering over how to  word what she wanted to say next “Do you want me to read a bit for you?”

“Sure.” he nodded as he headed towards the other bedroom, which was locked. He carefully turned the key “Let’s go.”

The other bedroom was smaller, and the bed was twin sized. He sat on it and looked around in awe. The walls had shelves onto which were displayed several stuffed animals and children’s fairytale books. Aiden liked to collect them because he was interested in how other children lived and grew up, the traditional media they were exposed to, and not having been able to experience that for himself he wanted to make a small sanctuary to that idea so that he could explore it whenever he found himself overflowing with curiosity. It was a mere scientific interest.

He was very much adult by now and he always worked hard and had the upper hand, like all adults would. He decided the game, because he was fully grown up by now. In fact, he was very gladly letting Camille undress him. She changed him into a cute looking pajama with cartoon birds printed on it, because  somehow he was smart enough to convince her to develop that habit. 

“You’re so far from home, baby. You grew up so fast, too.” she tucked him in bed and kissed his forehead “Do you miss the planet Earth?”

“Not really. I’ve been on Caerus since I was eight.” he shrugged “...But sometimes...Sometimes it comes back to my mind, yes.”

“I see. What would you like me to read?”

Aiden remained silent and thought about it for a moment, looking at the books neatly organized on his shelf, thinking about when he bought each one to complete his collection and doing so fondly. Lately, he was often in the mood for the story of Hansel and Gretel and Camille would read it to him gladly. He smiled as his eyes were caught from that title:

“I’ll have the usual.”


	5. Playing against birdies and meanies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The birdie taught Aiden how to win a game. So he decided to play against daddy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be all one chapter with what will be the following one, but I split it. This is the light half, so no trigger warning symbols for this one!

Hansel and Gretel  was a tale very dear to Aiden’s heart because it entered his life in a moment of desperate need, opening his eyes and giving him the courage he needed to start a brand new chapter of his life. Said moment, however, did not come fast enough. Until that, it was always the moment before  bedtime . It took years and he was begging for it ever since the birdie died. 

It was not easy to put out the burning birdie. Stomping on it with his little feet was fun for Aiden, but eventually he had to stop because he was barefoot and the flames were hurting him as well. The insides were warm and felt funny around his toes, though. Shame he wasn’t as invincible as he thought he was.  _ Stupid birdie, you’re not supposed to hurt me _ .

When the flames ceased, everything was quiet in a loud way, but pleasant. He felt like he emptied himself, like there was a pile of rocks inside of him and he sliced himself in half to make them fall off. His own inner wings kicking them out as they twitched heavenwards, matching his now spread wide arms, reaching a stillness as they gradually calmed down along with his breaths. The bitter aftertaste was so insignificant in comparison that it didn’t matter. It was trying to argue that what he did was wrong, but deep inside he knew that it was only the product of the time spent on the other end whispering to him, it was the birdie trying to get in his head to make him lose the game, but this time he won and there was nothing that could change that.

As he walked back inside, the front door opened so quickly that he didn’t have the time to go hide in the closet – why would he do it, anyway? His parents were going to find  him, they  _ had _ to come home and find him, it was pretty much the point.  _ Yet he expected to see Maeve, not Logan _ . 

“Daddy?” 

His father gasped in a mix of surprise and fear. What did he expect, that Aiden would accept the fact that he just left him to die? He did however mention Maeve coming back to haunt him, while in the car, and that was very curious. The boy smiled faintly, wondering if his father thought he was a ghost ready to make him regret not siding with him. Logan was so much bigger compared to his son, and yet he was afraid of him, afraid of the punishment. That was nothing but proof that Aiden could easily win the game against him if he wanted. Not that he wanted to hurt daddy, but it was quite a relief to discover that he was capable of doing so if only by scaring him. In light of those facts, daddy would surely learn to appreciate his help, wouldn’t he?

“W-what the hell are you doing here?!” his voice shook “You’re supposed to be dead!”

“I came here for you.” the boy’s voice sounded firm as it never sounded. He knew that not only he was in the  right, he was more powerful than his parents ever wanted him to believe. Well, more than Maeve wanted him to believe. Logan’s judgement had always been so clouded...What was on his mind now, after that terrible night? Him surviving didn’t erase any instant of that attempt. Perhaps Aiden  fueled him, in some way, but he was clearly craving it. Craving it like he had been seeking it for a while, because while the child observed his own  thoughts and watched that urge decrease, he could still see that strange glint in his father’s hauntingly empty eyes. He wondered if a hint of guilt could be one of the causes as of that moment.

“Daddy, it’s okay. I’m not mad at you.”

“ Wh -what? Why not?! After everything that happened...?!”

“You think there’s no way out, but there is.” the boy explained calmly as he took his father’s hand gently and led him to the backyard, the awful smell of the burnt pigeon still pervading the air “Here.”

Logan looked down at the poor animal without saying anything. He was trying hard not to change the expression of his eyes, but his jaw was clenched. He was clearly afraid and yet the act of not speaking or making a scene was him displaying bravery, somehow. Aiden found that irritating. The man could leave the conflict behind and be grateful, but that suggestion was apparently too beyond for him. The boy figured that it could be still the fear causing that detachment from the ability to see that truth, but if  _ he, a tiny five years old child _ , was forced to adapt and learn the rules of the game by himself, then why not his father?

“I’m training.” Aiden spoke after a moment of silence “I will save you.”

“What are you talking about? What are you  _ ever _ talking about?!” Logan leaned very far down to match his child’s height, grabbing him by his still wet sleeping clothes “Did you do this?!”

“Yeah!” he smiled “I know the birdie is small, but when I’m good I can--”

“Good at what?!”

“At this game that you and mommy are playing.” he explained with an almost solemn nod, only to find himself dubious about the great scheme of things “Does everyone outside play it too?”

“Wh-what?!” Logan immediately pulled away “NO!”

“Then why are you doing this?” he pouted. If it wasn’t how the world worked, why were his parents constantly picking on him? Why did the animals on TV, even the ones that cared about their younglings, kill smaller animals? The documentaries were always shot for the sake of information and truth, weren’t they? Humans were animals, weren’t they? Why was it wrong for him to kill the birdie to show daddy that he was going to be strong and protect him?

“You’re insane. You keep saying things that don’t make sense and...” he mumbled frantically as he looked back at the dead bird again, emitting a dismayed grunt “You killed that bird.”

“Do you want me to clean it up?” the child’s voice sounded almost bored. In that moment he felt like he could see a glimpse of what his mother thought, of why she saw Logan as an inferior being so tedious and weak. He had no spirit of initiative whatsoever; all he could do was mope about how tiring the situation was...As if Aiden wasn’t tired of being hit all the time. To think that Logan had all that power and refused to use it was disgusting, especially since he was so much physically stronger than Maeve. He could have killed her so easily but he preferred to take it on his son. He was an adult, he didn’t need any training, didn’t he?

“You think that  _ that _ is problem? You killed a living thing! That’s...That’s...”

“I’m a living thing too but you tried to kill me.” Aiden clenched his fists “I just want to free you from mommy so that we can run away together.”

“Free me?” Logan sounded less freaked out and more skeptical, raising an eyebrow with a fake inquisitory mood when he clearly didn’t want to hear anything “You really think that  _ you _ can free me.”

“Someone has to.” 

“Well, not you--”

“Especially me! Don’t you understand?” he took his father’s hand in an attempt to reassure him “They can’t blame you if I do it.”

“You want to kill your mother.” Logan whispered under his breath, surprised as if they had never discussed that very same idea back in the car. Sure, he was scared that time too, but why? Why was the idea of killing Maeve scary and wrong when killing Aiden was right, apparently? What about the things he told him in the rain after the accident? Was it all just a scene to make him accept that he left him to die? Why was he a hypocrite?

“YOU WANT TO KILL HER TOO!” the child lashed out “I KNOW IT! I CAN HEAR WHAT YOU THINK!”

“What the hell is wrong with you?!”

“IF YOU DON’T KILL HER, I W--” Aiden was interrupted with a loud slap that made him fall on the floor. He stared up at his father, challenging him. Fire against the abyss. Logan’s eyes were tired again when they should have been filled with terror given his behaviour, but that slap probably made him believe that the conversation was over and that there weren’t going to be any consequences for his refusal to cooperate. It was all useless.

Aiden brought a hand to his hurting cheek as he got up. Words didn’t come out of him easily, in fact he kept staring for a couple of minutes still before he could bring himself to say anything.

“Why are you here and not at work?”

Logan curled his lips attempting to smirk. That tiny glint in his otherwise empty eyes looked like it was moving, like there was some morbid excitement that that simple question brought.

“There’s no point in going to work.” that strange expression turned into a smile, but it wasn’t a happy smile – of course it wasn’t a happy smile -, it was an unhinged smile similar to what Maeve and Stavros’ expressions looked like that day, but softer. His voice too became higher and silkier “There is no point in doing anything at all. Money can only mean so much, you know.”

“I. ..I don’t understand.”

“You don’t have to.” he patted his child’s head “You won’t live enough to need that...Because I won’t let you. My money is mine. Not yours, not your mother’s, not anybody else’s. Okay?”

“But--”

“You were lucky, tonight, but I won’t let you stand in my way.”

“But I’m not! Daddy, I want to help you!”

“Well, you’re not helping me. Everything has gotten worse ever since you were born, but I can fix that. I’ll kill you before she can say anything to me and then I’ll run away.”

“Daddy...” Aiden backed away slowly, with his heart feeling heavy inside of his chest. To think that it could’ve gone so much differently if only his father understood that Maeve was the one he was supposed to kill. Aiden would have been by his side if he only let him. Daddy just didn’t want to get help, and a little tingle in the boy’s brain suggested that the mist was so thick that daddy couldn’t see, it was as if he was still driving aimlessly and getting Maeve out of the way didn’t feel like enough to clear the mist out. He was wrong in thinking that, but his son couldn’t convince him.    
Logan tried to catch Aiden, but he slipped out of his grip, so he chased him, but as the entrance door was starting to creak open the boy gasped.

“Daddy...!” 

Logan’s first instinct was to put a hand on his mouth and drag him in the closet with him. What was he thinking? What would that solve? There was no way out now, there were no windows in there. He was clearly panicking, tightening his hold on his son a bit too much. Aiden held back a whimper; it hurt, but at least daddy was holding him. As he heard Maeve close the door behind her and taking a few steps, he immediately side eyed daddy.

“ Ssshhhhh .” daddy gently whispered, slowly letting go of his mouth. His big hands were now going to the child’s neck and pressing. Aiden knew somehow that if he tried to run  away he’d catch him and snap his neck immediately, so he couldn’t move much, but he could scream. Scream and make mommy come to him, but doing so in a way that would buy him time. He gasped for air as his father’s grip was tightening, for some reason it wasn’t a very tight grip from the start - of course it wasn’t, he was weak on the inside no matter how physically strong he was – and he had at least a minute to live still. Extending his little leg, Aiden tried to reach the door. It was just an inch too far, being unable to close, but this was the right moment. He used all his strength to make a perfect kick, screaming as it opened.

“MOMMY!” he cried, but it wasn’t enough, he had to add something for her to care “MOMMY! DADDY IS--”

Logan covered his mouth again, shaking and not knowing what do. He was panicking, Maeve was standing in front of them with that inextinguishable angry fire in her eyes.

“What the hell are you doing here?!”

Logan stayed silent, and Aiden perceived his mother’s annoyance – he felt it, too, this time. He tried to free himself of his father’s grip, but eventually Maeve pulled him towards her. As the child gasped for air, he hugged her leg.  Of course she wouldn’t offer him protection of any kind, but pretending to be so stupid to trust her was the easiest and fastest way to make him immune from any of his father’s accusations.

“MOMMY!”

“What’s going on? Why doesn’t he answer me?”

“Because--”

“Don’t listen to him.” Logan spat out quickly, but Maeve raised an eyebrow.

“Well, if you had something to say you would have already said that.” she put her hands on her waist “I guess that the little shit knows something you don’t want me to know, doesn’t he?”

“He doesn’t know  _ anything _ , he’s a disgrace!”

“Then why didn’t you kill him? This is the second time you fail.”

“Oh, really?! Then why were you not okay with it when I wanted to let him die of internal bleeding, huh? Because you wanted to protect your interests – and by ‘your’, I mean yours and your friend’s.”

“You can’t play that card with me. You know damn well that it was all your fault.”

“Hey! We agreed not to talk about it in front of Aiden.”

“Do I...” the child looked up at his mother “Do I have to leave?”

“No, not at all.” Maeve leaned towards him and picked him up, holding him to her shoulder. They both knew that Logan wouldn’t have had the nerve to touch him like this, and now he could tell mommy how bad daddy was, so he smirked as he enjoyed her fake concern “Jeez, you’re  gonna catch a cold like this. I’ll dry you off, after we’re done with this. Now, can you tell mommy what happened?”

“Daddy said--” he interrupted himself with a sob, just to make sure “Daddy said he was going to kill you.”

“WHAT?!” Logan shrieked incredulously “I NEVER SAID THAT! HE WANTS TO KILL YOU!”

“Right.” Maeve scoffed and kept talking to her son “What else did he say?”

“He said that it will look like I did it.” he bit his bottom lip, slightly averting his mother’s glance to fake nervousness, but God was it tempting to see how the flames moved in her irises. He could do something better, though, he could look in the abyss of his father’s eyes, smirk at it  in spite of everything. That was what he deserved for hurting him when he just wanted to help. If he was so adamant on playing the game against him, then he had to expect a counterattack if he wanted to win.

“Like an accident?”

“Like I caused the accident, so that daddy doesn’t go to jail.”

“That’s oddly smart of him!” Maeve laughed, and Aiden joined her. Logan clenched his fists and gritted his teeth, trying to suck  both of them in the abyss, to suffocate them, to drown them in some sticky disgusting molasses, to make them become losers of this game just like him. He banged a fist on the table of the main room, but no use.

“FUCKING LISTEN TO ME, MAEVE! He’s lying to  you, he’s planning all of this. You know that he’s fucked up in the head, that he’s not normal! He’s the devil incarnate!”

“He’s  _ five _ , Logan.”

Logan sighed and shook his head.

“You will regret answering like this.”

“I regret every time I talk to you, for that matter. Got used to it. Now, if you kindly excuse me,” she commenced sarcastically as she put Aiden down “I’m going to cook lunch. You can grab a knife and try to stab me in the back, if you still want to go through with it, but I doubt you have the balls to do that.”

“Maeve--”

“Just turn on the TV, I want to listen to someone smarter.”

Logan grabbed the TV remote and threw it violently on the floor, stomping on it until it shattered. He was enraged, he wanted to express it, he wanted the loudness to scare  both of them , but even Aiden in that moment could see how pathetic he was. It was honestly disgusting to see him like that, embarrassing. Maeve seemed to agree with that. Aiden just turned on the TV manually and sat on the couch, swinging his legs back and forth. He figured he could reward himself by watching whatever was on instead of being hyperaware of his surroundings. There was someone being interviewed on the news.

“Can you explain the images you received from the space probe on Caerus?”

“We found some ancient structures, like large stone towers, build by an alien civilization. They are yet to be unlocked but from other data we received, there are water and vegetation. We will send someone immediately, plus samples will be taken and studied thoroughly by our science team. I’m glad I helped fund this research: if the results are what we hope for, this could be a huge opportunity for mankind.”

Aiden tilted his head. It seemed interesting but the person on TV kept saying difficult words in rapid succession and it wasn’t easy to assimilate, despite him being very intelligent. He could recognize maybe a few words of those written on the screen, since he didn’t learn properly.

“Mommy, I don’t understand this.”

“They send a thing to space.” she replied distractedly while breaking an egg into a pan “It takes pictures of planets and sends them to the people who study them.”

“It sends them to schools?”

“No, you dummy!” she laughed “It sends them to the scientists that control the thing.”

“Oh.” he stayed silent for a moment “Mommy, can birds fly to space?”

“What’s with your obsession with b--”

Maeve was interrupted by the sound of glass shattering. It was Logan violently slamming the TV onto the floor. This time Aiden was startled. Daddy destroyed his reward, his distraction, his only window to a happier world. He was a bad man. If daddy loved him he would have never done such thing, he didn’t care about hurting him, no matter what he said the night before.    
When Maeve sat at the table with food for her only, it hit him that he had made a big mistake and that that solution was temporary, that now he was even more of a target than he was before. He felt a bitterness that tightened his stomach, he wouldn’t be hungry even if Maeve cooked something for him. Daddy was completely right not to love him, now. The only consolation was that at least now he was hating him for a valid reason...   
He got up from the couch and headed to the closet.

“Where are you going?”

“I walked all morning. I’m going to sleep.”

He pulled the door behind him and got onto his bed, staring at some unspecified spot amongst the dark closet. He knew that they were going to fight again, only to turn against him. They were going to make up temporarily and hurt him together, because that was what they always did. Luckily, nobody could blame him for his own silent tears while he was hiding, but he hated himself for being so naïve to think that he could ever win that game. 


	6. Bedtime stories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Uncle Muiris introduces little Aiden to the tale of Hansel and Gretel, changing his life forever.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: child abuse , guns, arson, murder, violence, blood & gore, implied/referenced animal cruelty

After what happened that morning, Aiden expected the worst. He wasn’t exactly sure what was going to happen or how, but although he often sought sleep to escape his world, he mostly remained awake and plagued by anxiety. Every day and night he would get paranoid that either of his parents would attempt to kill him, but it quickly returned to what had for some reason established itself as the norm: daddy pulling him by his arm out of the closet and into his quarters, because the main room was too cluttered and he didn’t want to break anything, and just hit him until he passed out. He didn’t even need Maeve’s orders anymore, he would do it because he wanted to. Of course he wanted to, after what happened. Aiden had to suffer in silence, now. Just because he learned the lesson, that only adults could win that game, it didn’t mean that daddy was ever going to forgive him. Even after years, daddy never forgave him.

Things stayed more or less the same. The only real changes were that Aiden grew a little despite hardly ever getting to eat, and that Logan was a bit different. His eyes were still dark, but they looked like they were made of glass, they didn’t suck in the gaze of others anymore. The sadness behind them was much more silent, and his face had more wrinkles. He was paler as well, a once beautiful dark chocolate colour getting dull, almost mud-like. His breath was also different, because in those two years he picked up smoking, which would make him cough very often, but he would insist that it actually made him feel better. Arguing differently was always useless.

Another change was that now that Aiden was seven and a little bit taller he was tasked to clean the house all by himself. A small house was of course easier to clean than a big one, but his parents never bother to teach him how to do it, yet they would scold him upon finding mistakes. He was well aware that it was just an excuse for them to hit him, and although he tried harder to do a better job, he realized that eventually he would be scolded anyway. So he would focus on speed, he would clean as fast as he could so that he could take advantage of the remaining time to sneak outside. 

He lived in a very isolated part of town, with an otherwise unusual amount of trees, a place completely outside of the world, but he had no idea. Yet somehow it was the only thing he knew. The houses long the street were wide apart, and Aiden barely ever thought about his neighbours, because he was afraid of consequences. Every now and then he would consider knocking on a neighbour’s door, ask them to call for help, to keep him with them, but something always stopped him from doing that. It was never something logical, it was the way his legs started shaking from fear and making him unable to stand. Even if he was taken somewhere far away from his parents, what would he do afterwards? For what he knew, all adults were the same, and he couldn’t trust anyone nor bother to go from one nightmare to another.

As for the birds, he was still very much fascinated by them and he still trusted them to the point that he hoped that one day a giant bird would carry him away on his wings as it soared across the sky. They never did and he figured that it was because he was too big. Maybe he ate too much?

While browsing through the TV channels, he could hardly ever find stories about children taken by large birds. When discussing the topic, the people on TV would say that those birds were predators when attacking children yet when they attacked small dogs or cats it was because they saw them as a threat against their younglings. The people who told stories on TV were never children, they were always adults, so Aiden wondered if the adults thought the birds were bad because they would take the children away from them, save the children from them. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but he could only learn so much. At first, all that stress from his situation made the boy grow hyperaware of his surroundings and make very quick deductions, but lately he was feeling like something was switched off in his brain. A permanent sadness and heaviness much like his father felt, but he would actually find something that would reignite the spark in his eyes and in his heart whenever he snuck out for a walk: his animal friends.

Bugs buzzing around the flowers, little snakes among the unkempt tall grass, fluffy dogs and cats looking at him and slowly approaching him with curiosity from his neighbours' front yards. He liked running his hands through their fur, playing with them, wrestling them to the ground, and enjoy the little kisses they gave him. He would give them kisses too, show affection like those rare moments that mommy and daddy kissed, but they didn't like it when he did that, they seemed to be alright with him caressing only certain spots too. So it was inevitable that he would defend himself when the bit and scratch him, wasn't it? Eventually he would be relieved at the end of his playing sessions because maybe the pets did it on purpose so that he could respond in his way, it was some kind of game after all.

Animals understood him so much better than people, so that was another reason why he wouldn't talk to other adults. They wouldn't understand the way that he played with their pets, just like daddy didn't understand when he practised on the bird. Cats were so much bigger than that little pigeon, and he was proud to be strong enough to play rough with them. With dogs he wasn't as confident, they were more docile in temperament but they could get very big and he refrained from playing with the big ones. One day he decided to try again but a big dog bit him and he had to run back home immediately.

He rushed inside his house panting, gasping as soon as he saw daddy at the kitchen counter, trying to remove a stain from it and glaring at him.

“Daddy--”

“You were supposed to clean, goddammit, where have you been?!”

“I...I _did_ clean, daddy, it's just...That stain doesn't go away...”

“I don't wanna hear your excuses.” he turned, walked up to him and then grabbed him by shirt, lifting him against a wall “Your mother is coming very soon and she's already pissed off enough. If she finds the house looking like a pigsty and starts lashing out at me, then we're gonna have a problem, do you understand?!”

  
“Yeah...” Aiden nodded lightly, then grunted out loud as Logan threw him on the floor. There was something frantic about the way he breathed, more so than usual. The boy tilted his head: he was very surprised to see daddy like that, the man was shaking for no reason. Well, maybe it wasn't for 'no reason', but it still seemed an excessive reaction. He must have been feeling like that because of something else.

“Why is mommy angry?”

“No reason that you can understand.” he scoffed dismissively.

“I can try.”

“You still wouldn't understand because you're a stupid kid.”

“Oh...” Aiden didn't think of himself as a stupid kid, but he was aware that he had still never met another child his age. Maybe all the other kids really were smarter and he was behind.

He could still only confidently count to ten, of course he deduced how to get to ninety-nine but he had no idea what the actual names of the other numbers were – perhaps he should have spent those two years focusing less on bird documentaries and more on basic language including those. Eleven was just ten and then one. At least he knew the name of the number of his own age, and that was a relief. He didn't know ninety-nine but he knew nine times ten and then nine. There he was, unknowingly running calculations through his mind as daddy was yelling something he couldn't quite catch. Instead he just stared blankly as he spoke again:

“Do you not send me to school because I'm a stupid kid?”

“I--” Logan remained with his mouth open for a moment, baffled “...Yes. Yes, it's because you're a stupid kid, BECAUSE YOU DON'T LISTEN WHEN I TALK TO YOU!”

When Aiden brought his knees to his chest, he rolled his eyes and left him on the floor as he headed towards the car outside.

“Where are you going?”

“I'm not going anywhere. I'm just fetching a thing. Maeve might want me to use it if the guest decides to trick us.”

“Who else is coming here?”

“Someone who owes mommy a favour.” he replied casually as he walked back in with a gun in his hand. Aiden tilted his head, recognizing the object from a couple of movies that were running on tv. He remembered having a strange conversation on the matter, whenever his parents were watching movies he'd ask questions and they would dismiss him saying that the movie wasn't real, then he would ask what was the point of watching if it wasn't real and they said that it entertained them, so he asked whether birds were real or not since he liked to watch them, and Logan just beat him up and they never talked about it again.

“Is that gun real?” the boy asked as he got back up.

“No, it's fake...OF COURSE IT'S REAL, YOU IDIOT! What would be the point of me going around with a fake gun?!”

“To scare the person so that they will do what you want because they don't know that it's fake.”

Logan stared at him blankly for a moment, then he scrunched his nose, highly irritated by his son's nonchalance, why was the kid shrugging and making assumptions? The gun was very much real.

“I said it's a real gun.” he insisted.

“But you couldn't even kill _me_.”

Logan gasped. Then he gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. He was tired, tired of being made fun of even by a seven year old. Always treated like someone who didn't have his own brain, his own thoughts. He knew that Aiden thought of him like Maeve's puppet, and maybe he was, but he was still not be messed with, especially since he had shown his son multiple times that he was capable of hurting him and crossing the line when provoked.

“I decided to spare you. Don't take advantage of that.”

“So who is that you're going to shoot?”

“I already told you, someone who owes mommy a favour.”

“Is it her friend from Greece?”

“No, it's her brother. Your uncle.”

“Oh. Okay.” he was glad that it wasn't Stavros. Maeve didn't allow that man to meet him anymore, she would make her son hide in the closet for all the duration of their meetings. They would mention him often, but Stavros would always come over to give her bags of sugar and she would give him money. Logan got mad very often because the sugar was very expensive, yet when Aiden asked about the sugar in the kitchen he would say that it was cheap. Mommy wanted special sugar and when she couldn't get it she would get angry, and when she got angry everyone else had to pay for it.

“You're not asking questions? Strange.”

“She never told me that I have an uncle.”

“That's because she doesn't like him.” Logan replied dismissively.

“Mommy doesn't like anyone.”

“Pretty sure that 'anyone' reciprocates.”

“What does 'reciprotate' mean?”

“It's _reciprocate, _dumbass.” he groaned “It means that that the feeling goes both ways. So nobody likes mommy either.”

“So you reciprocate mommy?”

“At this point? Yeah.”

“Then why don't you shoot her?”

“WHAT?!”

“You said your gun is real.” Aiden shrugged “Just shoot her.”

“How about I shoot _you_?!”

“But I don't hate you. So you don't reciprocate that.”

“And?!”

“We're talking about shooting to show that you reciprocate. Even if you had the courage to shoot me you would be getting it wrong--”

“ALRIGHT, YOU LITTLE SMARTASS...!” Logan hit his son with the butt of his gun, then fell to his knees, shaking but laughing – it wasn't a loud laugh, it was a breathy and wheezy one – as he took the gun to his temple. A tear was going down his cheek, he was scary in a way similar to mommy after she took her sugar. _It's too much_, both thought. “Since you like to play the game...! Daddy hates daddy, daddy reciprocates, daddy wants to kill daddy and daddy reciprocates! Who's gonna shoot first, now, huh?! Oh, but daddy doesn't have the balls to shoot daddy, doesn't he?”

“Daddy, what are you doing?”

“You're such a gutsy little kid, aren't you? Why don't you shoot daddy then?!”

“I--”

“You don't reciprocate?! Are you sure? Look, daddy won't hit you if you don't clean his blood, kill daddy like you kill the birds! Daddy loves to die like the birds!”

His laugh progressed louder yet darker, becoming indistinguishable from the sobs, and the tears kept falling. Aiden brought his hands to his mouth, instinctively backing away disturbed by that image. The entrance door opened suddenly, forcing Logan to get himself back together, and for once the boy was glad to see mommy. She was wearing an ugly white dress with faded floral patterns, it looked like a ruined bedsheet readapted into one. Probably was.

“Come here.” she commanded sternly. Her brother followed her into the house reluctantly, holding a suitcase. He looked a lot like his sister, he was just slightly taller. He was a bit chubby, too, but what was most striking about him was that he looked healthy. His skin wasn't paling with the undertones taking over like Maeve's or Logan's, the long curls of his hair were not damaged, and his eyes were kind and relaxed. A bit distant, maybe, perhaps he too had seen something he wished he didn't see, but there wasn't a hostile fire in his eyes, rather a delicate amber.

Aiden instinctively hid behind his father, peeking nervously to keep track of the guest. Logan waved with the gun in his hand, only half faking nonchalance:

“Muiris. Maeve bitched a lot about you.” he held back another hysteric laugh “Did you bring what you've been asked?”

“Ah, you must be Logan! Maeve bitched a lot about you too.” Muiris surprisingly had a booming voice. It unsettled the child a little bit with its loudness “I did. I have my suitcase here, you might want to get this over with.”

“Very funny.” Maeve rolled her eyes “Now, can you reach the table on your own or do I have to kick your ass so hard that you fall in its direction?”

“You never change, don't you?”

“Apparently not, since I still have to do everything myself.” she groaned as she did indeed kick her brother, although not as hard as she clearly wanted to “Put the suitcase on the table and open it. Slowly.”

Muiris complied. The suitcase was full of dollar bills neatly organized in small stacks. Maeve called her husband's attention with a nod, at which he got closer while cocking his gun.

“The money better be real, if you don't me to blow your brains.”

“It's real. I've learned a long time ago that I shouldn't play this kind of game with my sister.”

“We'll see.” Logan brought his finger to the trigger to prepare to shoot, but his hand was shaking. Muiris seemed confused for a moment, but then gave him a strange look, one of sudden realization.

“You don't have to do this, Logan.”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING AB--”

“Is that your kid?” Muiris finally noticed Aiden. The child froze into place, afraid of having done something wrong by not running into his closet before he arrived. He backed away, hitting a corner behind him, and Muiris was alarmed by that behaviour “Are you okay, kid?”

“FORGET ABOUT THE KID, FOCUS OR I'M SHOOTING YOU.”

“Logan, shut up.” Maeve rolled her eyes “You're clearly not scaring anyone. I know it was kind of naive of me to believe that you could succeed in doing anything, but a woman can dream I suppose.”

“You didn't tell me that you have a son.” Muiris was unfazed by the others' comments. That seemed to irritate Maeve even more.

“That's because I don't have one. I know I _wanted_ a boy, but that's not what that thing is.”

“You dressed your girl in boys' clothes?”

“I'm a boy.” Aiden timidly intervened from the corner. He slowly walked towards his uncle and extended his little hand “My name is Aiden.”

“I'm Muiris.” he smiled as he shook the child's hand “I'm your mommy's brother.”

“Nice to meet you.” Aiden tried to smile back, but he was feeling too much tension “It's okay if you don't think I'm a boy. Mommy says it's a stretch.”

“Maeve, what the hell?” Muiris gave her a confused look.

“Little shit had an accident, needed surgery and all, but it didn't go well so there's nothing left. And that's just the front side, you should've seen the back! So yeah...It _is_ a stretch.”

“An accident? What happened??”

“Doesn't matter.” Maeve shrugged “Let's focus on the money. There shouldn't be any problem with it unless my _lovely_ baby brother played a prank on me, right?”

“True, but if you really have the upper hand, then you have all the time in the world to order your dog to shoot me. _Right, sis_?”

“WHO THE HELL ARE YOU CALLING A DOG?!” Logan snapped, aiming the gun at Muiris “YOU DON'T KNOW ANYTHING!”

“Sit the fuck down, Logan.” Maeve didn't even raise her voice, she just rolled her eyes yet another time – it was embarrassing that she had to do that –, then turned to her son “You, go to your room before I take the gun and shoot you.”

“Yes, mommy.” he headed to the closet, making Muiris gasp as he opened the door. For some reason his uncle found it outrageous that he had to share a cramped space where his bad could barely fit with rags and cleaning products.

“You keep your boy in a closet?!”

“If you care so much, why don't you take him home with you?”

“That's not a bad idea, you know?”

“I sure do! You give me the money, I give you the little shit. There, transaction complete, I don't owe you any favours and you both can go to the local circus. It's a win-win.”

“Or maybe I call the child protective services, I get him out of here and you go to jail for all the things you did...Or for not having your house respect the safety norms, I have no idea how you got into this ancient pigsty--”

“All of them, you say?” Maeve raised an eyebrow “Of course you were going to say that. You're still not over your petty grudges...But I was looking after you.”

“Like you're looking after him?”

“Ah, you wish! You were treated like royalty all the time, you were everyone's favourite, and yet you want to get me arrested or whatever because of what, exactly? Because I got mad sometimes? Because the way I used to play with you was 'bad and scary'?” her tone grew more and more mocking “Boo hoo, it was you who kept crawling back to me for it, wasn't it? Yet you want to be the pretty victim even after all these years, so you're projecting on my kid. You've always been like this. You don't give a shit about the kid, you just want to get revenge when I'm in fucking danger. _You're_ the bad person, here, not me.”

“Maeve...? What are you talking about?” Logan was not only confused and nervous, but also scared. He almost yelped as his wife snatched the gun off his hand and pointed it to her brother.

“I could shoot you right now, but that is exactly what you want. You want me to be 'the monster' once again, but I won't give you this satisfaction. Count the money in front of me, now.”

“It's one hundred thousand dollars.”

“Real dollars or fake dollars?”

“Depends on what's your stance on Canadian dollars.” he shrugged and laughed to ease the tension, but he was quickly cut off by a warning shot at the wall behind him.

“YOU THINK THIS IS A FUCKING JOKE, MUIRIS?! COUNT THE GODDAMN MONEY!” Maeve's sudden loudness startled Aiden, who instinctively grabbed the door handle and pulled it as close as he could. However, he didn't manage to do so quietly and that gave his mother an idea. She forced the door open and grabbed him by his arm “Actually, you know what? How about Aiden counts the money? And if you do something I don't like, well...”

Aiden felt the cold metal of the gun on the back of his head. He looked up at Muiris as his mother 'helped him' sit at the table, and he saw a pain similar to when he looked in that young doctor's eyes. Yet the doctor disappeared, was Muiris going to disappear too?

“Count the money.” Maeve commanded sternly.

“But I can only count to ten...”

“It's okay.” Muiris smiled at him “I'll teach you.”

“Really?”

“Sure. See all these bills? Each one is a hundred dollars. A hundred is ten times ten, and a thousand is ten times a hundred.”

“Okay...” Aiden seemed a bit hesitant “How much did you have to bring?”

“A hundred thousand.” Muiris realized that probably wasn't the best approach to teach a child how to count, especially since he was in deep thought, but then raised his head without blinking.

“That's ten thousand times ten, right?”

“Wow, you learn fast! You're a smart kid!”

“Daddy says that he doesn't send me to school because I'm stupid.”

“You know what?” Logan finally spoke again “I was wrong, you're a genius, okay? Do whatever you want, everyone, I just don't wanna hear any of it. I'm going out to smoke, don't call me.”

He exited the entrance door and slammed it closed. Muiris was visibly disturbed, but he wanted to reassure his nephew.

“You're not stupid. And you're supposed to go to school, how old are you?”

“I'm seven.”

“You're not seven, you're still six.” Maeve pressed the gun harder against his head “You turn seven in like...Ugh, what day is it?”

“It's May 24th.” replied Muiris.

“Ah, well, he's seven, then. In a few hours.”

“Tomorrow is his birthday?”

“Yeah, I'm not thrilled about him growing up either. Soon he's not gonna fit in that tiny closet anymore.”

Muiris looked at her with a baffled expression but didn't say anything, instead he just shook his head and restarted talking to the boy:

“Alright. So, since each bill is a hundred dollars, at the end it should be a thousand bills.” he took the first stack out of the suitcase “These should be ten bills, can you check?”

“Okay.” Aiden started counting them one by one “One...Two...Three...Four...Five...”

“Can we hurry this up?!” Maeve grew impatient, making her son nervous.

“Six, seven, eight...Nine...Ten! Is that right?”

“Yes, it's right.” nodded Muiris, who then pointed at the rest of the money in the suitcase “And look, all the other stacks are as big as this one. They all have ten bills each.”

“So each stack is one thousand?”

“Exactly. Now you're going to count those, okay?”

“One...” he pointed his finger at one of the stacks, then moved along as he kept counting “Two...Three...Four...Five...Six...Seven...Eight...Nine...Ten! That's ten thousand!”

“Yes! Good!” Muiris gave him a warm smile, then pointed at the stack they previously counted “With that one we counted before it's ten and then another one. Do you know what comes after ten?”

“No...” Aiden shook his head.

  
“That number is called eleven.”

“Eleven.” he repeated, visibly confused. He followed attentively as Muiris showed him the next numbers.

“Twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen and twenty. Twenty is two times ten.”

“So now we reached twenty thousand?”

“Yup. After twenty comes twenty-one, twenty-two and so on until you get to three times ten which is called thirty.”

“So it's ten, twenty, thirty?”

“Good. Now let me recount them fast.” he took all the stacks out of the suitcase and divided them in groups “Ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand, sixty thousand, seventy thousand, eighty thousand, ninety thousand and a hundred thousand.”

“Finally you're done!” groaned Maeve, withdrawing her hand with the gun “Thought this torture was never gonna end.”

“If you taught him how to count, this would've been easier.”

“Yeah, whatever, I--”

“Mommy, what do you need a hundred thousand dollars for?”

“That's none of your business.”

“Do you have to give it to your friend that brings you the sugar?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I might've put him into trouble because, well, I didn't pay for the sugar right away and the people he works with are not happy about it. Uncle Muiris is happy, though, because he can mope about how evil I am!”

“Okay. Is he staying with us?”

“If he wants to sleep in the backyard like a dog, sure! Only for tonight, though.”

“I'll take the couch, thanks.” Muiris failed to hide his irritation “What's for dinner, by the way?”

“Got some canned peas, serve yourself.”

“Sure...”

Dinner went pretty much as expected. Awkwardness and silence reigned the atmosphere, and everyone glanced at each other wondering what they were thinking, what unsaid truths were they hiding, and most importantly how to protect themselves. There was some mindless going through tv channels, there were failed attempts at starting conversations, but in the end everyone went to sleep without saying much.  
For some reason, Maeve felt the need to be loud in the middle of night, moaning louder than she probably would have done naturally while having sex with Logan, because she wanted Muiris to hear. Aiden heard her as well, but he figured out instantly that she was doing so to spite her brother. Maybe it was a way to simply tell him that she wanted her own space and that he wasn't supposed to sleep over. Eventually, she fell asleep again once they were done.

Aiden watched Muiris get up from the sofa and make sure Maeve and Logan were completely asleep. Then he walked to the closet and opened it. He had car keys in his hand.

“Aiden, can you come with me in my car outside? I want to tell you a secret.”

“Are you taking me away?” the poor child's tone was heartbreakingly hopeful.

“Not yet, but I need to talk to you to understand how I can help you.” he called him with a hand gesture “Follow me.”

“Okay.” Aiden followed his uncle to his car. He was quite nervous but at least he could sense that there were no ill intentions behind that, he figured he had to reveal what his parents did to him. He wondered if Muiris knew everything about Stavros at all, if they were friends – if mommy had always been friends with him. He was curious, but many secrets are too heavy for kids, even if they saw horrible things. Especially then.

Muiris took a deep breath and commenced: “Do mommy and daddy hit you?”

“All mommies and daddies hit their kids.”

“They don't.” he shook his head “It's just that some people--”

“Did yours hit you?”

The man remained silent for a moment. He bit his lip and then nodded.

“You see, sometimes when people get hurt they have a hard time getting better, and when they don't get better at all they can start hurting others as well.”

“So mommy got hit too?”

“She got hit even more than me, actually.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure. She was the eldest child and received more pressure, I suppose.”

“Because she had to look after you?”

“Yeah. Probably that feeling kept sticking with her and she has trouble with treating children right.”

“Why did she have me, then?”  
  


“She always said she wanted a child, but she still didn't want to look after anyone. She would fantasize about having the perfect child, a child that she could take credit for...I don't think she ever actually wanted one.”

“Oh...So if I was a good she would like me?”

“It's what she wants you to believe so that she can blame it on you.”

Aiden pondered for a moment. Why was Muiris telling him those things? They were not objective like facts about birds, they all came from his feelings towards his sister. Was Aiden wrong to believe them?

“Daddy said mommy doesn't like you.”

“Heh. It's true.”

“But do you like her? Because it sounds like you hate her too.”

“I used to.” Muiris lowered his head “I used to love her...A lot. Then something changed and well, I admit that I have hated her. It took me years to forgive her...To this day she still hasn't apologized, she believes she did nothing wrong.”

Aiden squinted. Something was not right in that reply. He could observe some deep sorrow in those kind eyes, but there was something so unconvenient in the words he was hearing. He thought it was strange, he had been wanting daddy to admit that mommy was bad for years, he had been wanting everyone to know that mommy was bad, but someone else was saying it he felt like he was siding with the enemy, that he was playing a game he shouldn't play because he always had to come back to her anyway if he wanted to survive.

“Our parents didn't treat us well. Even if I was their favourite, they...They were mean to us. Maeve was just helping me, but...” Muiris interrupted himself, for some reason. He, too, seemed to be having a similar panicky stream of thoughts “She was jealous. And even if we got rid of them together, she kept doing...Things...To me.”

Aiden tilted his head at how scattered his talking was, he was even starting to shake a little bit, but if whatever she did to him made him shake just to think about it then there was no point in asking him and make everything worse, right? Yet something was not clear.

“What do you mean you got rid of them?”

“It's like that one tale, Hansel and Gretel. Ever heard of it?”

“No.” Aiden shook his head, then gave his uncle an uncomfortable look when he took a little book out of the glove compartment, it looked old due to age but also purposely old, like a replication of something antique “I...I can't read very well yet.”

“That's alright.” inside the first page there was a cd, an audio version of the book that came with “You see, your mommy and I were a lot like Hansel and Gretel. Unfortunately it looks like she forgot, so I think I should pass this story onto you.”

“Will I become like mommy?”

“Only if you forget what the story means.” he put the cd in his vintage car stereo “I'd like you to listen to it.”

Muiris took a pen from the glove compartment, wrote '_To my sweet nephew Aiden. Happy birthday_.' on the first page of the book and handed it to the boy. Soon the narrator started speaking.

_Once upon a time there lived near a large wood a poor woodcutter, with his wife and two children by his former marriage, a little boy called Hansel, and a girl named Gretel. He had little enough to break or bite; and once, when there was a great famine in the land, he could not procure even his daily bread; and as he lay thinking in his bed one evening, rolling about for trouble, he sighed, and said to his wife, “What will become of us? How can we feed our children, when we have no more than we can eat ourselves?”_

“_Know, then, my husband,” answered she, “we will lead them away, quite early in the morning, into the thickest part of the wood, and there make them a fire, and give them each a little piece of bread; then we will go to our work, and leave them alone, so they will not find the way home again, and we shall be freed from them.” “No, wife,” replied he, “that I can never do. How can you bring your heart to leave my children all alone in the wood, for the wild beasts will soon come and tear them to pieces?”_

“_Oh, you simpleton!” said she, “then we must all four die of hunger; you had better build the coffins for us.” But she left him no peace till he agreed, saying, “Ah, but I shall regret the poor children.”_

A question came out of the boy so spontaneously that he didn't even gave himself time to think about it, it just jumped out of him and it seemed to make his uncle very sad:

“Do all mothers hate their kids?”

“Not all of them. Those who do simply shouldn't have become mothers.”

“Will their daddy do something about it?”

Muiris bit his lip. “...No.”

“Is he going to die, then?”

“I-- Just listen to the story.”

Aiden kept listening: the children overheard their parents' dialogue, and Gretel immediately started worrying. Hansel reassured her and they went to bed. Aiden wondered why was he so confident that everything was going to be fine, and already tried to figure out what the plan could be, but he had lived in an escapable predicament for so much time that even his brilliant mind shut down. So he stayed silent, growing more and more attentive in hopes of finding something useful that he could apply to his situation somehow.

Hansel's plan apparently worked: he dropped pebbles as their father and stepmother led them into the woods in order to mark his path, and in the night he and Gretel managed to come back home because the pebbles shone with silver moonlight and led them along the way. The step mother pretended to be worried, scolding the children for oversleeping, yet she soon convinced her husband to abandon them again as soon as scarcity reached the land again. This time Hansel marked his path by dropping crumbs of the bread that the parents gave to them.

“...But the bread doesn't shine in the dark! How are they going to find the way?”

Muiris smiled with amusement, he liked seeing his nephew so invested in the story. “How do you think they're going to find the way?”

“Maybe they'll wait 'til morning again...” Aiden hypothesized, then went silent again to hear how the story proceeded. The birds ate all the crumbs and the children wandered in the forest for the whole night and following day. They didn't have anything to eat, barely went on with the berries they could find on the bushes, and on the third morning they kept walking deeper into the woods. There they met a snow white beautiful bird and listen to its sweet singing. It spread its wings and flew off, the children followed it and soon arrived at a cottage made of bread, cakes and clear sugar.  
Aiden was relieved in knowing that they had something to eat and didn't starve, but still wondered how were they going to come home. If anything, he knew that yes, birds did save children. If it was just a strange fantasy of his, then the tale wouldn't have mentioned it. The bird was going to protect them. Soon his train of thought was interrupted by the introduction of a new character.

“_Tip-tap, tip-tap, who raps at my door?” and the children answered, “the wind, the wind, the child of heaven”; and they went on eating without interruption. Just then the door opened, and a very old woman, walking upon crutches, came out. Hansel and Gretel were so frightened that they let fall what they had in their hands; but the old woman, nodding her head, said, “Ah, you dear children, what has brought you here? Come in and stop with me, and no harm shall befall you”; and so saying she took them both by the hand, and led them into her cottage._

_A good meal of milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts, was spread on the table, and in the back room were two nice little beds, covered with white, where Hansel and Gretel laid themselves down, and thought themselves in heaven. The old woman behaved very kindly to them, but in reality she was a wicked witch who captured children, and built the bread-house in order to entice them in, but as soon as they were in her power she killed them, cooked and ate them, and made a great festival of the day._

_Witches have red eyes, and cannot see very far; but they have a fine sense of smelling, like wild beasts, so that they know when children approach them. When Hansel and Gretel came near the witch’s house she laughed wickedly, saying, “Here come two who shall not escape me.” And early in the morning, before they awoke, she went up to them, and saw how lovingly they lay sleeping, with their chubby red cheeks, and she mumbled to herself, “That will be a good bite.”_

Aiden's eyes widened in realization. He wanted his uncle to pause the tape but somehow he couldn't find the words to formulate his request, probably from the agitation, so he just gestured frantically. Muiris turned to him, offering his hand as comfort.

“Is everything okay?”

“The witch is the wife, isn't she?”

“I--” Muiris seemed conflicted on how to answer, afraid of both confusing him and teaching him something wrong “Well. If that was the wife, Hansel and Gretel would have recognized her.”

Aiden raised an eyebrow, fully aware of that lie in some way. The explanation he had to back up his statement made his uncle wince a little bit:

“They ate a lot of sugar. Mommy always sees things weird after she takes her sugar. She acts like she sees scary things and always yells.”

“Oh. I...Maybe...” Muiris tried to find some justification, but then he stopped and his expression just darkened “Did mommy perchance ever give you the sugar?”

“No. She wants it all for herself.”

“Oh, thank God.” he sighed in relief.

“Who is that?”

“Huh?”

“God.”

“Oh, nothing, it's just a saying.”

“I heard God a lot, but I don't know what it means.”

“Ah! Heh...” Muiris curled his lips, trying to figure out an answer “Everyone thinks of God as a person that created the world and now lives in the sky and watches everything.”

“Lives in the sky...Like birds?”

“Yeah, like birds.”

“Does God command the birds?”

“I think the birds decide for themselves.”

“Makes sense, I've never heard of God in bird documentaries.”

Muiris chuckled “Yeah, that would be strange!”

“Why?”

“Because no one knows what God looks like, so they cannot say it in science channels.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“God created the birds, though!”

“Really?” Aiden's eyes lit up with joy.

“Really!”

“Ah, that's nice!” the boy smiled with true happiness. “I like God.”

Muiris couldn't help but laugh.

“Yeah! I, uh, I too am a fan of his work.”

“God is a boy?”

“That's what they say, at least. They still have to prove it, though.”

“But...When people die, they go in the sky, right?”

“Right.”

“It doesn't matter if they're boys or girls, right?”

“Right.”

“So if God is a boy in the sky, is God dead?”

“According to a philosopher named Nietzsche, he is!” Muiris laughed in amusement yet again, he knew he was going to confuse the boy but this time he did so gladly.

“Ni...Nietzsche.” Aiden tried to repeat the name to process it “Is he dead?”

“Yeah.”

“So is he God now?”

Muiris stopped laughing immediately.

“...I think that's a fairytale for another time. Let's finish this one first.”

“Okay.”

  
Aiden took his uncle's hand and squeezed it tight as the recording continued. He was nervous because he really thought that the witch was Hansel and Gretel's evil stepmother. The witch locked Hansel in a cage, holding the children prisoner for days, and fed the boy a rich meal so that he became fat enough for her to eat. She would feel his finger to determine whether he was getting fat, but he tricked her poor eyesight by extending a bone.  
Still the witch ordered Gretel to fetch the water to cook her brother, be he fat or lean. She said that first they had to bake, and ordered the little girl to creep into the oven to see if it was warm enough. She wanted to push Gretel into the oven to cook and eat her as well, but she figured it out. Much like Aiden figured out what to say to stop his parents from killing him, she found the right words: she told the witch that she didn't know how do it, persuading her into creeping into the oven, then gave her a final push and locked her in, letting her howl in excruciating pain as she burnt to ashes. Finally she freed her brother, stole pearls and precious stones in the witches house, and they both ran back into the forest. There they found a large body of water with a white duck swimming in it, and they asked her for help:

“_Little Duck, good little Duck,_

_Gretel and Hansel, here we stand;_

_There is neither stile nor bridge,_

_Take us on your back to land._”

Finally the duck took them one by one to the other side. Once again, the birdies saved the children. Hansel and Gretel soon ran into their father's arms, he didn't spend one happy hour ever since they had disappeared and now his wife was dead, the children dropped all the pearls and precious stones, and soon the family lived happily ever after in abundance and all their sorrows ended.

“I'm happy that they got back together with their daddy.” Aiden commented.

“Me too.”

“You said you and mommy were like Hansel and Gretel.”

“Yeah...We used to be.”

“So did you kill your mommy?”

“No, nothing like that. We just managed to escape and got a new life together for a while.”

“I see...” Aiden's eyes were now lost in deep thought, his voice turning almost sultry like all the times he made daddy terrified of him “...But if you didn't have any choice, you would have killed your mommy, right?”

“Look...” Muiris seemed nervous “I'm not telling you to kill your mommy. It's not the only solution.”

“But what if I'm in a situation where it is the only solution?”

This time it was Muiris squeezing his nephew's hand “...I just hope you don't have to.”

“Thank you for telling me this story.”

“I--” why was Muiris starting to be scared of him as well? “You're welcome.”

Aiden didn't say anything and just stared at him, half of him was demanding that he backed up from all the statements and implied suggestions in that conversation simply because that was what it looked he was going to do, and the other half silently begging him not to.  
  


“Heh...I know you said you can't read very well, but uh, the booklet I gave you has the exact same words as the recording.” Muiris explained as he retrieved the cd from the stereo and put it back into the folder of the book “If you want to learn you can follow along. You're a very smart kid and well, I'm giving you this one, but I want to gift you all the stories in the world.”

Aiden hugged him tight, and he patted his little head. The boy couldn't believe that he finally found a friend. He wanted to stay with his uncle a little more, but a yawn escaped his mouth as he was very sleepy. Hence Muiris decided to read him the story again to lull him to sleep, tucking the book under his pillow once he gently took him back to his closet. He was finally having his first real happy birthday, he thought.  
Later in the morning, however, he was awaken by his parents arguing in the main room.

~○~

“What the hell is your problem?!” Maeve was yelling at her husband for God knew what reason this time..

“You! You are my problem, all of you! But it's not going to be you who kills me, not this time...!” although Aiden couldn't see his father, he could perceive that he was shaking.

“Oh, really? No wonder you can't get rid of any of us, then!” she emitted a dry laugh “You're such a good for nothing, I can't believe I wasted so much time on you.”

“YOU?! I WASTED ALL MY GODDAMN LIFE ON YOU!”

“Well, you didn't waste _much_.” her taunting tone was followed by another laugh, this time shrill as it would typically be when she was at peak meanness. Strangely, she emitted some unexpected surprised noise immediately after as Logan screamed in frustration.

“Logan...I...I was just kidding. Put the gun down.”

“No.”

“I said: put. the gun. Down.” she tried to maintain a stern and cold tone, but she was starting to faulter.

“What is it, Maeve?” Logan must've been inching closer because Aiden heard his footsteps. For some reason he felt frozen and he couldn't bring himself to peek through the opening of the door to spy what was happening “Are you afraid?”

“You wish!”

“Then, if you know I won't shoot you, I can play and point my gun at you all I want.”

“Ah. I see you're growing some brains, finally. How about we make this more interesting, then?”

A loud dragging noise followed. Maeve was moving a chair. At first Aiden didn't understand what she was doing, but then as he listened more closely he hard some muffled whimpers. His eyes widened in realization again, as his mother commanded with way too much pleasure in her voice:

“I caught him trying to the police and I don't need any more problems. _Shoot him_.”

Aiden panicked and felt his heart almost explode, his mind was completely clouded, all he knew was that he was terrified of losing uncle Muiris, and ran into the main room. The man was bound and gagged to the chair, and giving the boy a pitiful look, as if he was apologizing for making him witness to that scene, but he wasn't his fault. He was just the Hansel to his Gretel. He had to save him.

“NO!”

“Aiden, get the fuck out of the way!” Logan yelled at him, still shaking, but Maeve pushed him onto the floor. A shot fired from the gun, hitting the ceiling. The chandelier fell and shattered, and the boy's vision started to blur a bit from the shock of the loud noise.

Maeve, still tackling her husband, directed his hand towards their son:

“Look. Make a nice love gesture for me, I'll even help you: let's get rid of both of them. Then we can be happy.”

Muiris struggled even harder to free himself, his muffled cries getting desperate as he was terrified for his nephew, but he couldn't do anything but watch the boy run in every direction as Maeve fired repeatedly at him. Aiden had no idea how he managed to jump out of the trajectory of every bullet, he barely could process what was happening, unable to distinguish his own thoughts, he could only hear the heart pounding in his chest.  
Eventually, Maeve grew frustratred from Logan's lack of collaboration and simply snatched the gun out of his hand entirely:

“Ugh! Forget it!”

A loud shot followed after, but it wasn't aimed at Aiden. The child gasped in horror as he turned and saw what was left of Muiris's head, shot at point blank. There was blood sprayed all over the wall behid him, along with undistinguished pieces of what was inside. One big pink bloody blob slid from the wall to the floor with a squishy sound, there was something almost embarrassing in how dreary that was.

~○~  
  


Maeve didn't say anything, she was just standing still, stone cold. Logan, still on the floor, was shocked. It took him a little while to get up, and once he did Maeve just barked at him.

“Chop him up.”

“Gotta go to work. I'll do it at dinner.”

“Good to know.” Maeve grabbed the suitcase with the money that Aiden had counted with Muiris the day before “I have some business to take care of.”

Then they just left the house as if it were nothing, leaving the child alone staring at his uncle's body. Aiden knew this was the right time to call the police, he didn't even have to formulate the appropriate excuse, there was a dead man in the living room and that was enough. Yet he just didn't, for some reason. He knew he should have, but he was scared.

His father was the first to come home, cigarette in mouth and an absent yet uncaring stare, it wasn't even his 'distant pain' anymore, he was just gone. Completely gone. Somehow Aiden was aware, simply by looking in his eyes, that daddy was dead as well. Maybe this was too much, it was the limit, the thing that finally broke him, even if he had always been an empty shell.  
He was very silent and calm as he untied the body and laid it on the table, quickly undressing it. He took the meat cleaver, the one he was going to chop up Aiden with, and started to work.

~○~

First went the hands and then the feet. He stacked them in piles a bit like those bills in the suitcase. Then went the head, blood spraying everywhere as the neck was cut. Arms separated from the torso, then divided in upper arms and forearms – the elbows were hard and needed a couple of strong hits to make that happen. Then divided in smaller parts. The legs were harder and were separated immediately small bit by small bit. Logan stopped for a moment to figure out how to chop up the torso, and eventually just decided to release some anger by cutting again and again and again past the point of necessary. He knew Aiden was watching, sometimes their eyes would meet as Logan grabbed another cigarette, but nothing more than that.

Once the work was done and all the pieces were prepared, a question spontaneously came to the boy as he walked in to examine what was left of his poor uncle:

“Are we going to eat him for dinner?”

Logan stopped everything he was doing and froze for a moment. Then he slowly turned to his son, scaring him with the combination of his eyes emptier than usual and his face covered in blood. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it out on the boy's cheek, making him scream.

“WHAT WAS THAT FOR?! WHAT DID I DO?!”

“You're fucking crazy, Aiden, that's what you did.”

~○~

Aiden stared at him baffled. He would ask how he could say something like that after what just happened, but he knew it would be no use. He went back to his closet and decided to never talk about it again. When Maeve came back, everything went on as normal. He didn't know what his parents did with the remains of Muiris's body, and at that point he didn't even want to know. He just spent the night silently crying. He spent the whole week crying, actually, but at least they didn't know about his birthday present and he could still treasure it.

He reread and relistened to the story of Hansel and Gretel, both to remember his uncle and to deeply connect with the meaning of the story, to understand what he had to. Each time, however, the story seemed to confirm the suspicions he had from the very beginning: he had to kill the witch. So one night he went through the cleaning products which he shared his closet with, and poured cleaning alcohol all over his parents bed while they were sleeping. From there, still holding the bottle, he went all over the house, marking his path much like Hansel did with the pebbles and breadcrumbs, until he covered enough of it to be able to go out in the backyard. There he took a couple of rocks and smashed them together to create a spark. The spark soon became a flame, which extended from the grass outside towards the house and everything in it.

Soon he heard the screaming and enjoyed every moment of it.

Finally the witch was dead.


	7. Boys vs Girls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aiden has his own idea of how women are in relationships.
> 
> WARNING: Internalized sexism (both misogyny and emasculation).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm updating today in occasion of this fic's first birthday! <s>Up to you to judge whether or not it has Virgo vibes</s>

The little spark became a flame, and soon as it ran down the line leading inside the house it grew taller, seemingly splitting in one gentle flame that lightly chewed on the dreary curtains and wallpapers and in a wild, majestic flame that kept going, ruthlessly and menacingly, down its designed path, to the parents’ bedroom. Soon there were screams. Pained, blood curling screams that made his heart pound in his chest, as if he was going to be punished for it. He wasn’t, the very people in charge of punishing him were the ones dying by his hand. The fire was spreading so fast to the grass outside, too. 

He walked a few steps away, but he couldn’t help but watch. The witch is dead, the witch is dead, chanted a triumphant voice inside of him, but there was something else that was urging him without even speaking. Urging him to go inside, to watch her die and stay by daddy’s side as he died too. Poor daddy. He had no choice, did he?   
The flames were now high in the main room, the closet door was open and there was only one big flame inside that covered the view, smoke rising, stench of burnt hair coming from the other room. It was...Dreamy, somehow, it was calling him. Logan was one with the burning bed, and he wasn’t just screaming, he was crying, crying like he knew that this was the last time he could ever do it. Maeve had gotten up, stumbling about the room as she screamed, her son was the last thing she saw, with an expression not as defying as he wished he had, in fact the boy was very much spacing out. 

She ran towards him, falling on her knees but still pointing at him, her red romper louder than ever as it fused with the flames, with her skin, with her face, with the devilish skull underneath her face. She tried to catch him, to embrace him to make him die with her. No matter how painful it was for her to speak, she wanted him to know, like the evil witch she was...Or maybe it was just a scream, but he did hear words:

“DIE! DIE!” 

A final, prolonged scream as she collapsed. The flames and smoke were almost reaching him, but he was at peace. He was at peace for the first time in his life. He closed his eyes to enjoy the happy ending of the fairytale. 

_ “ _ _ ….Finally _ _ the duck took them one by one to the other side. Hansel and Gretel soon ran into their father's arms, he didn't spend one happy hour ever since they had disappeared and now his wife was dead, the children dropped all the pearls and precious stones, and soon the family lived happily ever after in abundance and all their sorrows ended.” _

Camille closed the book and put it back on the shelf. She seemed genuinely happy to see Aiden so relieved after the story. He watched her tilt her head and adjust his covers lovingly. 

“You liked it, baby?” 

“You know it's my favourite.” he smiled softly, a bit distractedly. Maybe one day he was going to tell her why this was his favourite fairytale, perhaps she would've appreciated it and bonded with him on a deeper level, but on the other hand this was a joy that was so personal to him, that no one could take away, that it almost felt purer to keep hidden. He too looked purer as this child who was completely untouched by evil thoughts, even after filthy hands ripped his very essence off him, especially then. He was a cute little child, and that was just his thing, being beautiful like that. He was just beautiful and no one could do anything about it, no matter how much he was rotten inside. Besides, if others were unable to keep themselves beautiful while rotting inside while he could do it so easily, perhaps he really was better than them. 

He closed his eyes again to taste Camille's kiss more as he leaned in, gently pinning him down. She was eager to get on top, but she refrained. Still she brought her hands to his face, cupping it gently, staring down at him with dominance and desire. 

“It's only 8pm. Are you sure you don't want me to help you get more tired so that you don't wake up too early?” 

“I'm tired enough, thank you.” he grimaced lightly “I want to go on my morning walk earlier, tomorrow.” 

“How much earlier?” Camille curled her nose, eyes getting distant in thought. Aiden didn't like that. 

“Oh. I see. You're afraid not to make it in time?” 

“Tomorrow is Saturday, my kids are home. I'd like to spend some time with them before going to work.” 

Work. As if him being her collaborator automatically made him a nuisance, something that got in the way when she deliberately sought him and tried to have sex with him every three seconds. She was so insistent, probably she was insecure, there _ had _ to be an insecurity somewhere or she wouldn't waste her time with him, nobody normal so far had ever considered spending time with him as other than a waste. At least he could take that to his advantage, but _ damn _, he didn't even have anything left between his legs for her to play with, was she making fun of him? Did she think he was a freak? Did she only dress him in children's clothes because of that? So that was what she thought of him?! 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” 

“If you're not going to be here early tomorrow, _ then yes _, maybe you should make me more tired.” he muttered passive aggressively “You know I dislike being alone in the morning.” 

“Baby, it will be just for the morning, I promise I'll come.” 

“Of course you will come, it's your job.” he replied flatly, resisting the urge to roll his eyes “I just don't see why would you leave your family for me if then you act like you care about them.” 

“I care about my kids. It's my husband that I'm divorcing, not them.” 

Aiden stayed silent for a moment. 

“...Are you sure you want to divorce?” 

“Wow, really?” she barely held back a chuckle “You're that needy?” 

_ Needy _. He was anything but needy, perhaps the childish clothes must've distracted her for her to dare say something like that. 

“You believe that that's why I asked, because I am 'needy'.” 

“What is it, are you still mad at me? Look, I'm sorry, it was my mistake. I will always ask before I ever touch you again, I promise.” 

“_ Why do you want to touch me? _” 

“What?” she tilted her head. 

“I said: why do you want to touch me?” his expression darkened “I don't have anything to get you off. I’m not really a man or a woman, down there...” 

“You're kidding? You’re so much better than a man or a woman, you're the sexiest thing I've ever had the pleasure to play with!” 

He tried to ignore that first strange, disgusting, othering statement, but...Thing? Play with? Perhaps he had overestimated her ability to choose words earlier, given that now she was expressing herself with the least tactful sentences she could come up with. A grown woman should have really known better. What if she knew and deliberately didn't care? Their relationship wasn't a romantic one, after all. 

“Why?”   


“Huh? What do you mean ‘why’?” 

“I don’t have anything to get you off with.” 

“You’ve got your hands, and that pretty mouth of yours.” She smirked. 

Aiden shivered and blushed timidly, flinching as if he was trying to hide behind something invisible. He was very embarrassed by that comment, for some reason. Interacting with her private parts was always strange, she would hold onto his head and talk dirty to him but still treat him like a child, even in that context. He wanted protection and bedtime stories, not whatever this was, during sex he wanted to be an adult. Then again, he had to unlock himself, especially after all the things that happened with that man, with Stavros…But to do so without even having functioning genitalia, it wasn’t that easy. Probably most people that had gone through the abuse he went through still had it intact, and had something to work with at least.   
College was not easy for him, the couple of girlfriends he managed to have found his problem off-putting, and pitied him even if he found a way to make them feel good. They refused to touch that badly sewn little bump he had left, often after those dates he wondered why didn’t the doctors push to perform another surgery after the complications, why didn’t they just repair it, why didn’t they just refuse to listen to Maeve. His witch of a mother was really going to impact him forever, wasn’t she? 

“Still, it would be better if I could afford surgery…” 

“Surgery? What do you wanna have down there?” 

Aiden tilted his head, confused by the question. 

“I mean, you’d make a cute girl, but—“ 

“I’m not a girl, and I don’t plan on becoming one.” 

“Alright, just making sure.” She raised her hands “It’s also true that it’d go better with your natural looks…” 

What was that supposed to mean now?! Aiden was offended by that insinuation. Did she see him as a girl? Did she only call him ‘boy’ out of pity? Did she think of him as a ‘sissy boy’? He had heard that one way too many times not to associate bad feelings with it. 

“I used to have a penis. That was my natural look.” 

“Yeah, but it was dainty, small, and cute, like the rest of your body! You’re not going to have them give you a big one, right?” 

“It would take a few years before I can take that step financially, so this is not an immediate problem. _ Also _, you don’t choose the size.” he tried to mask his irritation. What the hell was wrong with that woman?!

“I like it how it is now, anyway.” 

“But…Don’t you think I’m a freak? All my girlfriends hated it…” 

“All one and a half of them?” she laughed “Baby, girls are not capable of appreciating boys like you. They want a grown man with a grown cock, but they don’t want the commitment of holding a little angel like you, giving you baths, changing your diaper, making you lunch and dinner, playing with you…All these little things.” 

He grunted, not sure how to feel about that morbid response. A small part of him was asking ‘is this really the only way for someone to have a relationship with me’? The most logical answer was no, there probably was another way, a better way, but this was the only one currently available nonetheless. He was going to cheat on her as soon as he had the occasion, it wasn’t like she only cared about him anyway. He earned it, after such conversation. 

“What is it, sweetheart?” 

“Oh, nothing. I will see you tomorrow.” 

“Alright. Goodnight.” she kissed his forehead and quietly gathered her things as she left. He was annoyed about being left alone, but eventually he fell asleep despite the hour and he did some chores in the early morning once he woke up. After that he put on casual clothes, a purple hoodie and a pair of jeans, and left at about half past six. 

Walking around the streets of Caerus alone was more relaxing that he thought. It wasn’t that Aiden disliked healthy alone time, but whenever he left on his own he felt he didn’t have the guarantee that anyone would miss him. Which would mean that if they didn’t, then he wouldn’t have anyone to concentrate on but himself. He could always fantasize about his plans on what he could do with others, if anything. He could watch the few people who were out early for a morning jog or simply to enjoy the quietness, wonder if that really made them peaceful. Perhaps it did, the place got very much crowded by the afternoon. 

The point of Caerus almost seemed to be the sight, in his opinion. It was ‘the planet of opportunity’, with all the schools and educational structures of every kind, the holographic libraries, even some old-style libraries with vintage paper books – maybe uncle Muiris found the Hansel and Gretel booklet there? Aiden never actively thought about it, perhaps he should have checked, not that it changed much...Unless that was some cheesy romantic connection that he was meant to have with this place, the one that was meant to take him away from a bad childhood, to give him a better one. It did give him a better childhood, but that in itself was not really telling. 

Caerus was the planet of resources, too. The vegetation had now become a monument, every single standing evergreen pine tree was being shown off, almost worshipped, yet many were cut in favour of buildings, in favour of human activity, the same old methods that of course were bound to be used, but with much more hypocrisy to them. The snow was an inconvenience. 

There was a statue of the man who ‘discovered’ the planet, Augustus Sanna, and of course he wasn’t a scientist. He was the one who funded the first travels to start the colonization, and he took credit. Aiden recognized it from that one video footage in the news that he saw as a child. He remembered asking if birds flew to space. There weren’t as many birds on Caerus, unfortunately; the place seemed more the planet of empty promises, to him. The good part of empty promises is that sometimes others can’t tell if they are empty, and with that mindset Aiden was more than proud to show off his many degrees. He was a success story, a useful tool if anyone wanted to use him as an example, from a broken child who only knew violence to a respectable gentleman who started from the bottom and made it by simply being patient and smarter than everyone else. He wasn’t famous, but well known enough due to a public demonstration of strength, courage, and wisdom which cemented him as one of the most promising teenagers...It had already been two years from when it happened. He shivered, it felt too close still and decided he didn’t want to think about it. 

What he had to think about, he figured, was Camille: she could easily see something appealing in him, no matter how questionable, but...Was it really appealing enough to outweigh family? After all, she left him alone to see her kids, and he couldn’t really blame her for that. God knew how he wanted a family. Why was she divorcing, then? Didn’t she want to have a family? Was having strange, mostly incomplete intercourse with him really worth leaving all of that behind?   
Clearly it wasn’t. Perhaps, had he been ‘whole’, he wouldn’t have that doubt. Yet it was specifically because of his injury that she liked him so much. 

_ You’re so much better than a man or a woman _, she said. He remembered all the bad things other kids said to him, all the testosterone injections to be like all the other boys his age as he grew up, his voice getting deep but hardly any other feature showing up: not enough facial hair to have a beard, a still round and even feminine face shape, no muscle, hardly any height increase struggling to get at 5’5. With a bit of heels he could get at 5’7, which was a relatively acceptable height although still below average. Those who showed interest in him would rarely think of him as a handsome man, rather as a ‘pretty boy’. Luckily, he didn’t have to worry about that: he was still twenty years old, still so young even though he had to grow up fast, it was nice to be a pretty boy. As much as Camille made him uncomfortable, she allowed him to be a child unlike everyone else. He liked being dressed up as a child, he liked having the opportunity, even if she would always eventually try to turn it sexual. 

A childish mischief appeared on his face as he went shopping for baby items. He liked bibs, nursing bottles, onesies, everything that made him feel cute, and thankfully no one seemed bothered seeing him buy those things. He just had not to look suspicious and buy the adult diapers separately. As more places started opening, he went to grab a hot chocolate. They made it too sugary, and he disliked the taste, but children liked sugary foods and he wanted to play the part. 

At a nearby table he recognized Ella Christine Goodwill, the patient that came the evening before, nervously looking at her COM pad. She was a pretty young woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a white knee-length dress with red and pink flower patterns, the fabric looked very light and thin in spite of the weather, it must have been the prettiest daytime dress she had – or at least the one she thought to be the prettiest. Aiden found her aesthetically pleasing: white open toe shoes showing nails painted red in contrast with her milky white skin, a nice insistence on attention to detail if only the shoes weren’t pathetically dirty, yet it was the messy parts that made her look beautiful, such as her untamed ginger curls escaping the bun hairstyle she had tied them in, the numberless freckles dotting her cheeks and shoulders, and her dark eyes that somehow shone because of all her emotions. The overall look paired really well with her BPD. 

“Good morning, miss Goodwill.” he smiled softly, walking up to her with his shopping bag in his hand – the thick diaper packs made it a bit too heavy for him to carry it comfortably, but he pretended there was no strain. 

“Oh! Doctor Price!” her eyes sparkled, her voice bubbly and high pitched “Please, have a seat!” 

“Are you sure?” he asked timidly “You seem to be waiting for someone.” 

“I was, but he’s not coming.” she couldn’t hide her disappointment “Guess I’m going to have to make new plans for today.” 

“Well, I start working at eleven. I have already run my errands, so I have free time as well.” 

“Can we pass by your office?” she asked nervously, without thinking. Aiden was very pleased with that, he knew she was going to ask. 

“Of course.” 

She got up, towering over Aiden now that she was standing, making him glance away as he was facing her – thankfully almost flat - breasts, and she looked down at his shaking hand holding the bag. 

“What are you carrying? It looks heavy.” 

“Oh, it’s not heavy. Don’t worry.” 

She almost snatched it out of his hands, taking it not violently but still rather assertively. She did so effortlessly, without feeling the weight of it. 

“You’re right, it’s not heavy! Mind if I carry it for you?” 

“Uh. Thank you.” 

As they walked out of the bar, they proceeded deliberately slowly. It was nice to have each other’s company, despite Ella having a somewhat whiny personality, but Aiden figured it was exactly what he needed in that moment: someone who depended on him, someone too weak to make him feel inadequate. Also, she seemed to be into him, lately, mostly because he was always there to listen to her ramblings. It was his job, and she paid him to do that, but the less rational part of her was unable to comprehend it and hoped for something more. 

“You said you wanted to stop by my office. Did something happen yesterday?” 

“No, not all. It’s just that...I was making dinner for my dad, and my step mother berated me because she wanted me out of the house for privacy, told me I should hurry up to find a job.” 

“I see. Perhaps we should get there before you expand on the details so that we can discuss this more comfortably.” 

“Yes, thank you. I promise I will pay for this session next week when I--” 

“Don’t worry.” he smiled softly “We will just not count this one as an official session.” 

“I don’t know, it doesn’t feel fair.” 

“It’s alright, really.” 

“If you say so...” she lowered her head, heels drumming onto the pavement slowly for a few steps until something caught her attention and she stopped: it was a poster depicting an ancient communication tower built by the native population, the exact same picture of it that was shown fifteen years before on the news when Aiden was watching as a small child. Ella complained. 

“Ugh, look! Today there’s free entrance to the East Tower. Looks like it’s going to get pretty crowded. As soon as we’re done, I’m going to _ hide _ in my apartment, I swear.” 

“I cannot blame you for that.” he chuckled lightly “Social gatherings can be quite stressful. Especially if everyone is gathering for the sake of a tower that was never functional to begin with.” 

“They’re doing it for the aesthetic, I bet.” she had the audacity to say while wearing that dress in such a cold temperature. What a delightfully pathetic sight. Aiden smirked, continuing to listen to her pointless rant in silence. As they arrived at destination and he led her to his office, she started feeling dubious as she stood by the door. 

“Doctor Price...Are you sure you don’t want me to pay for today? I...This is just not fair.” 

“I assure you that it’s not a problem.” he pulled his own chair and sat, smiling softly. 

“But you _ need _ the money!” 

“_ Excuse me? _” 

“Uh...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude, but...You live here, right?” 

“I do.” he tried to sound as neutral as possible, luckily succeeding “I felt it was a convenient choice. I promise that it will not stop me from being professional.” 

“Right. Where should I put this?” she lifted the bag to bring his attention to it, at which he immediately pointed to a corner. 

“You can leave it there, thank you; I will sort it out later. Please come in.” 

“Alright...Well, there isn’t much to tell about last night, really.” she sighed as he sat on her chair “I’ll look for a job, send in some resumes again and hope it works out this time.” 

“I remember some employers saying I was overqualified for a few jobs while I was eighteen and still looking, so there might be--” 

“Overqualified at eighteen?! How many degrees did you have?!” 

Aiden didn’t respond and glanced down in embarrassment. Ella gasped in surprise. 

“You had all those already?!” she pointed at the various framed degrees on the wall. 

“Plus a few other ones that are not on the wall...But it doesn’t matter! As far as I know, the minimum requirement for a low pay job is still two degrees.” 

“Well, I failed to even get _ one _, don’t you remember?” 

“I would take you in as a substitute for my secretary, but...You’re already my patient, so...” 

“Yeah, um, about that...” she started toying with a stray curl long curl next to her ear “I’m not sure why I asked to come here today. I came yesterday, and nothing much happened, so maybe I shouldn’t bother you. I’m sorry.” 

“You don’t bother me at all. Also, you helped me carry my bag.” 

“Heh.” she forced a smile, then lowered her glance on him and started giving an intrigued look “You know, I’ve never seen you in casual clothes.” 

“Oh!” he looked down at his jeans and purple hoodie “I-- I apologize! I’ll change immediately!” 

“No, no, it’s fine! You look cute.” 

“Oh. Thank you.” he blushed lightly “You too are dressed nicely, today.” 

“Yeah...” she sighed, then repeated “_ Yeah _. I was supposed to look nice for someone.” 

“You didn’t mention this appointment, yesterday.” 

“I didn’t.” she nodded “I don’t know how to explain it, I felt that if I didn’t say anything about it then it wouldn’t have been real thus unlikely to succeed, it was just an idea and when things are just ideas they always ‘can work’, in theory.” 

“Is this a new person or someone we have already discussed?” 

“A new guy, through a dating app. Thought it could work, but...He must’ve just sensed the crazy.” she admitted with a defeated laugh. 

“Which part of the...Crazy do you think he sensed?” 

“The part that says I’m not worth keeping around in the long run, that I might be a good one night stand but not even a good one night stand is worth going through...Well, the burden that it is to deal with me, I suppose.” 

Another defeated laugh. He offered her a sad smile, which she must’ve found reassuring. She knew he was feeling the same, but figured he was empathizing rather than coincidentally dealing with that problem himself in regards to his relationship with Camille. Of course she thought it was about her, not without reason since she was the topic, but how self-centered of her! 

“That would be making assumptions about the other person. Did this man specify he was looking for a serious relationship?” 

“He did! And so did I! Maybe I pressured him too much by arranging this date?” 

“Well...If he really is looking for a serious relationship, then he wouldn’t have contacted you if he didn’t see you as a suitable partner. Even if he happens to be among those people who prefer having more online conversations before a meeting, it is very clear that knowing someone in person provides...A more accurate picture of the situation, which would be ideal seeing as soon as possible for a person who has serious intention.” 

“Okay, but he didn’t show up at all.” 

“Did he specify why he didn’t come?” 

“No, he just said last minute that he couldn’t. I know these things can happen, but...What if he just decided he didn’t want to come and made an excuse?” 

“Then he was not as serious as he claimed to be and you dodged a bullet.” 

“Probably literally! People on the internet write the scariest things, I can only imagine what they’re like in real life...” she waved her index around while still playing with her curls. 

“There are many dangers about people from the internet, yes. However, I must remind you that those are easily avoidable. Blocking someone does not mean being weak, it means curating one’s personal space within their internet experience. It would be wise to listen to your gut instinct and simply block anything that makes you uncomfortable, even topics and people that bore you or mildly inconvenience you.” 

He fluttered his eyelashes. This was too easy, she was going to isolate herself and be completely at his mercy, because she was so desperate for guidance, she really had this stupid idea that following instructions would have gotten her to safety. Which could be true if only she pondered over _ whose _ instruction to follow, at this point it was his duty to teach her a lesson. It wasn’t like she didn’t have to learn it for her own good. 

“It doesn’t have to be severe, and right because you have been taught to second guess yourself you should train yourself to trust your own judgment and build self-confidence.” he continued “You can still expand your horizons and go out of your comfort zone while practising self-care, these concepts can coexist.” 

“Well...That sounds...Good, but also kind of fake?” 

“Why is that?” he tilted his head to feign innocence. 

“How do I make myself capable of handling real life issues if I block minor stuff on the internet, if I block people on the internet? Even those who give me the slightest bad vibe?” 

“That was a mere suggestion on my part. Again, you have to train yourself to trust your judgment. This would be a safe exercise that could help you discern the kinds of people you would like to be around and those you would like to avoid.” 

“But you will help me...Right?” Ella nervously bit her lip. 

“Of course. I am here to assist.” 

“You’re too good to me, I shouldn’t even be here today and--” 

“I am providing you a service.” he shrugged “It’s the least I could do.” 

“It’s not just that.” 

“Do you believe there is something else?” 

“Yes, _ you _! You are different.” 

Oh, no. He knew exactly where she was going with that. Not like other boys, because they were stupid, and rowdy, and big, and hairy, and smelly, and mean, and basically acted like cavemen as opposed to him who was ‘one of the girls’. For what, exactly? Washing his butthole? Being civilized? Being capable of basic oral comprehension? He hated her. 

“Different from who?” 

“From all the guys I date.” 

_ There _. Women were so predictable. He found that embarrassing. 

“I must remind you that, despite my attire, we are meeting in a professional context. It is my duty to behave in a professional manner as opposed to how I would behave on a hypothetical date.” 

“So you’re saying you are like them?” 

Why wouldn’t he be like them? Did she really think that being polite made him less of a man? Could she, perhaps, sense that he didn’t have a penis anymore solely based on his behaviour?! In that case, he couldn’t let her get away with it. Nobody should’ve known. He had to get rid of anyone who had such uncomfortable suspicion and-- 

“Are you saying you are like them?” repeated Ella. 

“I’m afraid you might be extending your generalization from your dating circle to the entire male gender.” he squinted, not hiding his irritation too much. 

“I...Did I offend you?” 

“Whether or not your statement offended me is beyond the point. The point is that making such statement is not beneficial to you. Using that mindset, you are actively sabotaging your dating life by either revolving around men who fit that label or by shaping your perception of them around said label regardless of what they are actually like. Think about it as a self-fulfilling prophecy.” 

“Wouldn’t that be ‘magical thinking’?” she mimed quotation marks with her fingers, probably feeling smart for using a technical term, that ignorant train wreck of a woman “Thinking stuff into existence? Thinking that you can think stuff into existence and that you can influence it?” 

“Miss Goodwill, I am glad to have this session with you, today, but if you insist on not cooperating, then perhaps I should prepare for the scheduled patients and leave you to think about this until our next meeting.” 

“Ah! No!” she started panicking, because _ of course _ she started panicking “I—I'm sorry, I didn’t mean to—Doctor Price...!” 

“It’s not personal.” he shook his head, chuckling “Do not be concerned.” 

“_ Are you sure? _” 

God, she was so needy. 

“I’m sure.” 

“You don’t really want me to leave, right?” 

“Of course not.” he faked his best smile for her “However, I should change my clothes. Do you mind waiting for me? I’ll be back in a minute.” 

“Doctor Price! Seriously, it’s alright, you don’t have to change your clothes. I don’t mind the hoodie, and I do think you look cute in it!” 

He smirked, expecting that, then turned around and pretended to further tidy the room as he spoke. It was time to prepare the ground for her to put on her show. 

“Miss Goodwill. I am thankful for you being so understanding, but it’s important for me to do this on principle. I don’t want you to think that I am taking the liberty to be unprofessional, even if it’s something that you are supposedly fine with, because I owe you this service as you came to me to ask for it. Especially now that you felt the need to do this ahead of schedule, if anything it indicates that you need my help now and I want you to know that I am here for you always, and that in this occasion it shouldn’t be different from the rest of our sessions in any way.” 

Ella stood up, moved a couple of steps towards him, taking the bait as instructed. 

“Why are you insisting on this?” 

“Because...In a situation where everyone takes advantage of your availability, you need a guarantee. I am very thankful for having had the opportunity to meet you in a more informal context and sharing a nice walk as you carried my bag, but--” he interrupted himself with a sigh and glanced down. 

“What is it?” 

“A few sessions ago, after you ended your most recent relationship, you claimed to be interested in me, and today you assessed that I am not like other men in a supposedly complimentary way, and have already referred to my appearance as cute due to my casual clothes.” he answered sternly, changing immediately his cold expression to an extremely coy one as he made himself smaller, timidly turning towards her again to simulate sincerity “I...I enjoy spending time with you, Miss Goodwill, and I would treasure your friendship, but...If I indulged, I would hurt you.” 

“This is what you’re worried about?” her eyes were predictably sparkling with emotion. She really thought she was special! Her entertaining stupidity made her look so pretty. “Hurting me?” 

“Of course. The well-being of my patients is my number one priority.” 

“Doctor Price.” she took his hands in her own. _ Here she goes _, he thought. “How old are you?” 

“I’m twenty.” Aiden admitted, with actually genuine shame this time. 

“Only twenty?” 

“It’s not that young...” he mumbled nervously, mentally reminding himself of where this was going to see he still had the upper hand. 

“You’re kidding? You’re a baby! You can’t even drink yet!” she laughed, but not in a mocking fashion, she seemed very endeared “You shouldn’t have to act this serious all the time, it’s okay if you loosen up just for this once.” 

“I...I had to grow up really fast, yes.” 

A hint of sorrow couldn’t help but creep through his voice as he eyed the bag in the corner with all the bibs, the baby bottles, the diapers, all of that...But Ella’s hands cupped his face. 

“We can take care of each other.” 

“Miss Goodwill, you don’t owe me this. I will take care of you regardless.” 

“Let me always carry your bags, then.” she purred, getting her face closer and then whispering suggestively in his ear “How about I give you some life experience? I know you need that to understand your patients.” 

“May I ask you what is your point?” he pulled away, pretending to be scared. He barely realized he really was nervous about her obvious sexual desire “I have already abundantly proven that my age has nothing to do with my skill and competences, and it is exactly for this reason that I--” 

“_ I can help you get rid of these clothes. _” 

Aiden gulped. 

“I’d like that.” he replied softly. Yes, he did want this, he just had to find a way that would not give away his secret and still have him completely in charge of the interaction. 

“You know...I have been interested in you for a while, now, but...I have never imagined how you’re like in bed.” 

Of course she didn’t, ‘because he wasn’t like other men’. Stupid bitch. Oh, yes, now he was going to show her. 

“I suppose there is only one way to find out.” 

~○~ 

He pushed Ella on his desk, leaning in to kiss her, and she immediately wrapped her legs around him as she reciprocated the kiss eagerly. Her freckles didn’t really pair nicely with her flushed cheeks, they felt redundant as anything she ever did or said. She whined as he untangled her legs from his hips to get on his knees. No panties under her dress. _ Classy _. 

Doctor Price this, Doctor Price that, she was vocal in the most uninspiring way as he forced himself to move his fingers and tongue about her area quite awkwardly, somehow still earning pleasured moans despite it being an irritating experience for him. He expected to like it, since she had proven herself to be an appropriate target many times, but it was just tedious. Milky white skin like hers was fetishized by a few as something innocent looking, but no amount of paleness could make her disgusting vagina look less worn down, look less like being fucked was the entire purpose of her life, he hated her so much, he hated her stupid girly complaints to the point that taking advantage of them wasn’t even entertaining. 

Yet it wasn’t really her that bothered him. She wasn’t a woman, she was all women, it wasn’t a vagina, it was all vaginas. They were so easy to get to, and yet they gave nothing back despite their claims. The sex wasn’t satisfying, the vaginas kept being ugly and the women kept being worthless, what was he supposed to find attractive in them? No wonder the alleged satisfaction from this event was planned around the manipulation. Once she was close – it took a pathetically short amount of time, but Aiden was thankful – he withdrew suddenly and left her exposed, wet and confused as she immediately went to finger herself like a clueless, shameless monkey would do in front of everyone in a zoo. 

“D-Doctor Price! Why did you stop?” 

“The clock.” he nodded towards the digital clock on the desk “I...I’m going to be busy, now. I’m sorry.” 

“Ah! It’s okay!” she was still flushed red “Aren’t you—Aren't you gonna finish?” 

“Do it yourself.” he commanded sternly, then faked a smirk “Cum for me.” 

She nodded frantically, and barely gave him the time to finish his sentence as she complied. It was hard for him to resist the urge to roll his eyes. 

~○~ 

He stared at her barely concealing a disgusted expression as she quickly got collected and left. After that, he threw his clothes in the washing machine and had a shower, now feeling reassured about women, including Camille. He was so much better than all of that filth. 


End file.
